


The mysterious magic of the perfect catch

by Cuits



Series: The sweetest swing in baseball [2]
Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-14 23:02:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13018029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: Later in life, someone will bother to write her biography and they would say that her truer love had always been baseball.They will almost be right.





	The mysterious magic of the perfect catch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thelittlestdoc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlestdoc/gifts).



> [@thelittlestdoc](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlestdoc/pseuds/thelittlestdoc) asked for slow burn. Hope you like this.
> 
> This works in the same universe as [The learning curve of a screwball](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8856196), but you don't need to have read that one.
> 
> For all intents and purposes Mike's mom is indonesian, as is Mark-Paul Gosseleaar's, and some events from 1x04 never happened.

**-451 days**

Her age isn’t her age. 

It is the necessary side effect of the life she has lived, which translates in having to grow up and be mature at an early age while missing some basic experiences for good measure. Ginny feels like she is fifteen and fifty at the same time, leaving her always at disadvantage. 

It annoys her that she is always out of place, like the universe doesn’t know what to make of her. She lacks representation, a mirror, a guide. A fucking beacon. It’s like being in front of a tropical forest, green and _thick_ , trying to create a way through with your bare hands.

There is no-one really that walks in her shoes, that knows what it’s like, but nevertheless, she never lacks a myriad of voices claiming to know what’s best for her, what she should do, how she should act. It often gives her a monstrous headache.

It almost always pisses her off.

“Smile,” the photographer demands.

Ginny doesn’t breaks her posses but instead of smiling she glares at the camera as the flash goes off another couple of times.

“Come on, smile,” the photographer insists, and she doesn’t have to take a look around to know that in the official posters of her teammates there is not a single goofy smile, all serious and intense in their demeanor.

“Why?” she asks annoyed and Lawson snorts, so loud and intrusive that both, the photographer and her, turn their heads to look at him, seated in a folding chair, reading a book and supposedly ignoring them.

She was supposed to be the last one in taking this promotional photoshoot due to a conflict in her schedule, her teammates all over and done with this shit a long time ago so she is at a loss as to what exactly is Lawson supposed to be doing around.

“You look prettier when you smile, sweetheart,” says the photographer. She has forgotten she has asked a question which becomes mortifying when Lawson snorts again because she wants to prove herself to the world and show what she can do but mostly, at this point in her life, she wants to prove herself to her captain (she blames her inner fifteen-year-old self), and this nonsense doesn't help her case at all.

“I don’t think you have asked my teammates to smile when you took their pictures,” she says.

“Yeah, and you didn’t call us ‘sweetheart’ either,” mumbles Lawson still not taking his eyes from the book. “I feel _so_ discriminated.”

He sits in that chair like he is doing it a favor by putting his ass on it, like is doing the world a fucking favor by existing. His feet planted squarely on the floor and his knees far apart as he leans against the back of the chair while he holds the book with a gigantic hand, his strong fingers keeping the pages open without effort. He looks like the poster boy of a jerk and she shouldn’t care what he thinks of her.

But she does. She wants him to notice her, as a ballplayer. To respect her game, to value her input in the field, which are not the kind of things she could achieve by smiling and looking allegedly pretty.

“You two are just making my job unnecessarily harder,” the photographer whines and Ginny rolls her eyes and shoots him an ironic smile as he keeps taking picture after picture.

“Whatever you say… _sweetheart_ ,” Lawson says, again without even bothering to look up and Ginny is ready to bet that Mike’s only purpose is to antagonize the photographer for some obscure reason probably related with unflattering angles.

The truth is they have been with this photoshoot thing longer than she expected and far longer than she feels comfortable with. There is something that irks her about striking poses for a sustained amount of time that just makes her crankier and less photogenic by the minute so she figures, one way or the other, the session is coming to its end.

“What are you reading, anyway?” 

Lawson looks up at her for the first time since he came down and perched himself in that damned chair. There is something playful in his eyes, the same kind of playful that the cat that messes with the mouse has before going for the kill, and Ginny sets her back a little bit more straight and prepares herself to avoid getting eaten.

“ _How to lose friends and alienate people_ ”

In the background, the sound of the camera rhythmically going off feels like white noise.

She crosses her arms over her chest. “So… an autobiography, then?”

The guffaw from the other side of the camera lens comes as a surprise but she refrains from looking back at the photographer. Lawson barely smirks, still looking intently at her, which is the oldest power play in the book and one Ginny has learned to deal with a long time ago.

“You are not as funny as you think you are,” he says, although the tone of his voice is far from harsh.

She smiles, her chin goes a little higher up in the air as she cocks her head in the direction of the camera. “He laughed.”

“He also said you were prettier when you smile.”

It’s a challenge, she knows that, and she considers asking him if that means he thinks she is pretty when she doesn’t smile but that way leads to all the places she doesn’t want to go so she shrugs instead.

“Not everyone’s ideal aesthetic is Leonardo DiCaprio.”

Lawson gets up and takes a step towards her, with his book in his hand and his unaffected attitude. He leans slightly, the distance among them still more than proper but from the outside it would appear he is about to tell her a secret.

“He has magical eyes.”

This time it’s her laugh, sudden and loud, filling the room, hiding the lower, steadier sounds of the camera going off.

Of course they end up using one of those pictures, not for her official poster but to automatically sent them to fans that request it by mail to the club. Her smile is wide and open, her dimples hollow and her eyes bright. 

It looks sincere.

Amelia loves it and Ginny doesn’t hate it as much as she thought she would. She still takes the time to find a head-shot of Leonardo Dicaprio, Titanic era, and put it in an envelope before slipping it among the Captain's things.

The inscription on the back reads: “To light up magicless, lonely nights.”

 

**-382 days**

The game in San Francisco is an uninspiring affair. They win, barely. Their game is off, just slightly less off than the Giants’ and the grey weather seems to fit the mood in the locker room. Ginny can still feel the chilly, humid air hitting all her muscles through her uniform, like a thousand tiny acupuncture needles inserted the wrong way.

It’s not the worst game she has faced, not by far, but she still was a little relieved when Al pulled her out in the seventh inning and she sat on the bench with a straight face for the rest of the game with the firm resolve of ignoring the pain radiating from her insides.

Damn, she can’t believe she has run out of Advil.

On the bus to the hotel she sits inconspicuously, trying to relax the muscles of her lower abdomen, refraining herself from getting her knees up and hugging them to herself. She is a girl, she is _the_ girl but in baseball, nobody wants to acknowledge the full meaning of it if it’s not to bring up the supposed fragility of the supposed weaker sex.

She has been there, she has heard it all before, she is definitely not in the mood to hear it all over again.

The ride is mercifully short but her lower back is killing her, and stepping down the bus without hunching over requires concentration, some dissimulated gritting of her teeth and a couple of well concealed deep breaths. Her face is a mask, she doesn’t smile when she politely declines joining the boys for a beer at the hotel bar but she doesn’t let on the pain she is feeling either.

She considers it a victory far more worthy of a celebration than their sad game against the Giants.

She has had barely time for changing into baggy, comfortable clothes and plugging in her electric heating pad when there is a knock on her door and she is very, very tempted to loudly demand karma to give her a fucking break. Instead, against her better judgement she opens the door.

“The vending machine didn’t have licorice so I got some Mars bars.”

Lawson doesn’t even wait for her to acknowledge his presence and just invites himself in her room, pausing in the middle of it for couple of seconds before deciding to drop the chocolate on the side table near the small sofa where her heating pad rests.

Ginny feels momentarily petrified, menstrual cramps and everything. Her hand is still on the doorknob as if refusing to let go of her only exit strategy, waiting, for the fake commiseration or the abused, normalized, sexist comment to come, but it doesn’t. He picks the only chair of the room and moves it to where he seems to consider is its right spot, near the couch, so Ginny decides to finally close the door for lack of a better option.

Her uterus claims too much of her attention. That's the only reason why she is not currently analyzing a variety of possible worst case scenarios that include her team captain and his huge feet on the coffee table, making himself comfortable in her room.

She sighs, drags her feet towards the couch, hunched and bracing her abdomen. She is too tired and bothered to keep feigning she doesn’t feel unapologetically like shit. It’s her room and her insides are angrily bleeding out, she will deal with the consequences of exposing evidence that she is a menstruating woman in due time.

“What are you doing here?”

She lies down and arranges the pad to help lose the wired muscles of her lower abdomen and picks one of the Mars bars.

“You looked pretty miserable out there,” he says matter-of-factly, reaching for the TV remote and pointedly not looking at her. “I just wanted to check if it was only something that some chocolate and Advil could improve or if it was something else.”

“I ran out of Advil,” she answers, misery tainting every single one of her words before she groans her petulant frustration. 

Lawson sighs and looks at her sympathetically before shaking his head lightly with far too humor in his eyes for her liking.

“Okay,” he says getting up from the chair, “I’ll go and buy you some.”

What? No. It’s bad enough that she has something as basic and unavoidable as biology against her, she is most definitely not going to let it also be the excuse to be patronized. Less of all by her team captain.

She can feel the panic in her rushed words. “No, no. I wasn’t implying—”

“Gee, Rockie, relax,” he says raising his hands up. “I’m just going to the Walgreens around the corner, I’m not going to ask for a pound of flesh in return.”

Another sudden cramp makes her hiss lightly and her toes curl with tension. She would gladly give a pound of her flesh for some Advil right now, or for a hit on the head to leave her unconscious.

“Okay,” she says like she’s agreeing to a root canal without anesthetics. “Thank you.”

Mike rolls his eyes in a way that reminds her of little children demanding unreasonable things of adults and if she had energy to spare it would piss her off immensely. If she seems too worried about inane things it’s because she has been burned one too many times.

She lets her eyes close as she listens to Mike’s soft steps over the carpet towards the door and door being open.

“Since I’m heading out, do you need anything else?” he asks nonchalantly.

Ginny opens her eyes with a snap. He can’t be asking what she thinks he is asking. She grew up with a father and an elder brother neither of whom would voluntarily come close to feminine hygiene products without putting a hell of a fight.

“What?” she snorts. “Are you offering to buy me tampons?” she says turning her head to have a better look of him, half expecting to embarrass her capitan.

“Not as a rule,” he answers like there’s a real possibility that he would get stuck with the chore permanently. “I’m not your damn errant boy.”

Ginny is not sure what to say next. No smart retort comes to mind as Mike raises his eyebrows impatiently.

“No thanks, I don’t need anything else.”

He nods. “Okay, I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t eat all the chocolate.” And finally leaves closing the door behind him.

The silence is suddenly striking and she concentrates on relaxing the muscles of her lower back that keep demanding her attention through unadulterated pain. She groans and cusses in the privacy of her empty room, changing her position, trying and failing to feel a little more comfortable until her Advil dealer comes back.

She smiles at the thought, just a little. He is probably only being this nice to her because she helped him when he hurt his back in that stupid bet. 

Yep, that might be it. 

That has to be it. 

Mike Lawson, smartass baseball legend and unapologetic womanizer is not the type to act like this, all comfortable and normal around the evidence of women’s biology. She counts with endless sources of stereotypes to back her up.

Maybe she is going to have to start questioning all her preconceptions regarding her teammates.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is what true partnership among team members looks like and she just hasn’t been fortunate enough to encounter it before.

 

**-352 days**

Ginny and the whole world wake with the news that Joe Highfield, veteran left-fielder for the Dodgers, has officially become the first gay MLB active player to publicly come out in the middle of his career. His name is everywhere: the news, the papers, social media. Suddenly every reporter claims to know everything about him and it is impossible to channel surf without coming up with headshot after smiling headshot of the guy.

She feels instantly relieved. 

This development has nothing to do with her, with her life and yet, it’s like the ever-present expectations for her achieving milestone after milestone have finally expired. The torch has been passed, the curse transformed into another person’s problem. She can finally breathe a little deeper, walk a little lighter and if there is a pang of guilt inside her for being glad at the expense of what’s essentially media-target-kindred-spirit of sorts, she tries to appease it by convincing herself that she has no real power over what interests the press anyway.

It is just the way life is. Or so she have been told for quite some time now, every time a piece of her life got exposed to the public eye for everyone to scrutinize and comment in twitter.

Ginny prepares herself a coffee with skimmed milk and a lot of sugar and watches cartoons on the TV to avoid all Joe Highfield related news. It’s a small gesture to avoid contributing to the culture of massive consumption of public figures private lives, even though it won’t make any difference.

She goes for a run, she works out, makes some online shopping and even calls her mom in an attempt to keep her curiosity at bay until she finally gives up and gives in. She takes a defeated, deep intake of breath and turns on the TV in time to see the new _it_ guy smile brightly at the camera of some shitty talk show.

Question after question the host sympathetically tells Joe over and over again how brave and admirable he is, but there is something in the way she just puts her hand over his that rubs Ginny the wrong way. Big time. She can resonate with his words of feeling like an outsider but the warm, compassionate reaction to what he is saying is pretty much foreign to her.

She wonders briefly how much of that has to do with the fact that she is a young, black woman and this dude is a prime specimen of a white male. How much it has to do with the way his blonde hair is combed just so it looks effortlessly great, his perfect teeth, or how comfortable he looks in front of the cameras.

Her cell phone rings about half an hour later, when she has finally forsaken any pretense of not participating of this gay celebrity circus and is blatantly engrossed in Joe Highfield’s press and promotion parade.

“Your name is so out of the news loop that I had started to wonder if I had dreamed your whole existence all along,” Mike says. There is no malice in his voice, it almost never is but she is tired and feeling a little more cheated than usual by mass media, societal female expectations and a lot of other complicated shit so she groans audibly and rolls her eyes.

“I’m sure there is obscure female objectification implied in what you’ve just said but, honestly? I’m just too tired to point it out and school you about it.”

Mike chuckles. On the screen this Joe guy makes a naughty comment about nudity in the clubhouse and leering that seems delight the studio audience.

Ginny wants to scream.

“So how much of a douchebag am I for thinking this guy is a douchebag?”

She doesn’t want to sound bitter, doesn’t want to _be_ bitter, but it seems like the only other person who is going through an experience that resemblance hers seems to be in fact a little bit of an ass and not someone Ginny finds particularly likeable. It’s like karma can’t stop itself from kicking her on the butt once again.

“Not nearly as much as you are for other reasons—” she makes the appropriate dramatic pause, “— douchebag.” She speaks in an affectionate, cheeky tone that she knows will cover her latent distress.

On the screen, Highfield comments on the attractiveness of his fellow players and she would like to be able to tell herself that what bothers her the most is the lack of professionalism and not the double standard as the host laughs delighted. Her brand would have been ruined for a comment like that. Her whole career could be over if she ever dared to speak in such a blatantly sexual way about her teammates and people heard her.

She grabs the phone hard, her knuckles white with the effort as she almost forgets that the line is still open, that Lawson is still at the other end of this erratic conversation.

“I mean, at least 10% of the population is gay so statistically there has to be a bunch of other active players that could be coming out of the closet,” he whines, “and it has to be this guy?”

The frustration leaks into her bones and leaves her with an uneasiness that she can’t shake out of her system because, who are they to judge this guy, to judge how he chooses to live his life? How he presents himself to the public eye? But also? Yeah, fuck this guy and the privileges he enjoys while presenting himself as the poster boy of the unprivileged.

She chooses to go for the easy joke because the words are easier to speak. “Is there something you wanna tell me, Lawson? Are you about to make sense of all those tense, heated glances you throw at Duarte?”

“Yeah, I have a confession to make,” he slurs, and Ginny’s mind is still too focused on being personally offended by the guy on the screen to see the pun coming. “I would gladly made out with Duarte to spare us all of _this_.”

Ginny laughs, the mental image of her teammates making out is less comical than she would like to concede but his tone is hard to resist. “Seriously, Baker, I would have made out with Butch. On the mount.”

She keeps laughing, throaty and loud, unshed tears welling in her eyes. “Don’t laugh, Baker. This is serious business. The press is going to be asking us about this guy for months to come and there are only so many polite synonyms of “douchebag” in the English language.”

“So you are going to have to learn to politely insult him in other languages?”

“Yeah, probably.”

The sun is setting down and the room slowly starts to fill with dark, long shadows. The TV screen brighter by contrast, Highfield’s teeth whiter, his perfect hair blonder and his words blunter as the night sets on. She suddenly feels irrationally lonely and misunderstood. 

“You could ask Duarte for help. I’m sure he has some pretty colorful, Spanish insults in storage.”

“Stop bringing Duarte up. I’m trying to focus on one jerk at a time.”

Ginny snorts. She knows that the Captain doesn’t despise the younger catcher as much as he pretends. Under the right pressure, she would even say that he likes the guy and she wouldn’t be wrong, but there are clashes of egos and hypermasculine façades to sell so, whatever. 

“You are the one who couldn’t shut up about making out with him a moment ago.”

The talk show host invites Highfield to rate players for their attractiveness and potential gayness. He rates Trevor with a seven and a four respectively and Ginny rolls her eyes, tries not to groan audibly, not to expose herself on top of everything else. Highfield rates Lawson with an eight and a six and can hear her Captain tired, heavy breathing at the other end of the line.

“Forget the making out, I would have sex with the whole team except you to erase this guy from the media and revoke his celebrity status,” he says nonchalantly.

“Except me?” She was not going to ask that. She is most definitely not a little bit offended and more than a little disappointed at his use of those two words.

“Well… yes,” he says vehemently. “Because then everything would be about slutshaming you and that would most definitely defeat the initial purpose.”

It would be completely stupid and ridiculous to let a couple of tears fall down her cheek for such absurd words, but absurd as they might be they stuck with her nevertheless. There is this thing with Lawson, this indefinable quality to him, that allows him to say preposterous declarations that somehow still make her feel better about an assortment of things, mostly unrelated to him.

She is not sure if he does it on purpose or if it’s by pure chance but she feels far less lonely in her darkened room and that is not a small feat, given the day she is having.

On the TV screen, the host is announcing the end of the show and the guest of honor kisses her theatrically on the mouth as the credits start to roll.

She says it before she can bite her tongue. “What a douchebag.”

And this time is Lawson the one laughing at her ear.

**-303 days**

Ginny is cursed by the unforgiving Gods of PR with the worst case of stomach flu that she can remember ever catching in all her life.

Her whole body is sore, the whole sum of her muscles protests with every single movement she makes and she empties the content of her stomach with a regularity that spurs her doctor to throw the concept of “dehydration” at her with serious vehemence.

So naturally, the press worldwide decides to announce that she is in fact, pregnant. God forbid that a woman dares to throw up under any other pretense, like disgust for the press, for example.

“We should address the issue,” Amelia says with conviction, her statement leaving little room for a rebuttal.

“No,” Ginny says as she tries to drink a couple of sips of some isotonic drink. “I’m not going to give a statement about some fake news that misogynistic, bored assholes choose to write.”

Which is probably not the wisest of choices since a couple of days later, her alleged pregnancy is confirmed by “anonymous sources” close to her. From then on, the speculation about who the hypothetical baby daddy is feels like a personal attack every time a new name is thrown in the lot.

Livan’s name is one of the first names to be brought to the light. The torrid affair between the two of them is apparently a bad kept secret between teammates and club staff, as evidenced by the fruit of their lust.

The second, a couple of days later is John Legend who Ginny has met a total amount of once in her whole life when they both attended the same event about a month ago. He is, very obviously going to leave his current wife since he has been terribly in love with her since the affair began and they both plan to move in together with their future, inexistent baby as soon as the divorce papers arrive — to give John a better chance at the battle custody of his firstborn. Obviously.

But it is when the name of Blip Sanders is carelessly mentioned that she stops being pissed off and starts to be inflammatory mad.

“We have to stop this garbage,” she says as her stomach starts to tolerate liquid diet and her muscles and joints stop hurting every time she breathes.

Amelia is classy enough not to say “I told you so” but Ginny reads it in the spark of her eyes nevertheless. “I’ll put Eliot to coordinate your social media with a strong message denying the whole mess without explicitly saying you are sick.”

Because yet another perk of being a woman among men is that it is forbidden to be just plain sick: you are either dying and a martyr or too weak. Fuck Kris Bryant and his very public cold a couple weeks ago.

Ginny nods. “Tell him not to be too afraid to write words like misogyny and racism.”

Amelia makes a face like Ginny’s trying to make her agent’s life more difficult on purpose. “I’ll handle the message,” she concedes instead, and Ginny guesses that’s good enough.

Nobody could ever accuse Amelia of lack of either conviction or bluntness.

“They have only linked me with men of color, you know?” she says before Amelia leaves, because she is not sure she has even realised it.

Amelia nods and leaves her in the bed with the TV on. She wants to throw something heavy at it every time she changes channels and an image of her zooms in on the screen.

Pictures of her and Livan in training and get-togethers, of that time she went to Disney on Ice with Sanders, of Evelyn’s Thanksgiving dinner party. She doesn’t quite know how to feel about the fact that Mike is in most of those pictures with her, often, closer to her than her supposedly secret lover of choice, but nobody has ventured to speak his name linked to her fantasy pregnancy. 

Mike Lawson is male and pale enough to be respected and lifted above this kind of gossips, it seems. It enrages her to the limit of her current limited strength.

It also seems like her partiality for her captain is not obvious and of public knowledge, which soothes her more than she would dare express with words.

“I’m very sorry about all this mess,” she says to Evelyn, embarrassed, when she comes to visit with some homemade soup.

She makes a dismissive gesture with her hand and comes to sit next to her over the comforter of the bed. “Don’t mention it. It’s not your fault.”

The doctor had said she is no longer contagious so she allows herself the comfort of having her friend beside her as they both sit against the headboard of the bed as the remains of the day go by. The TV is still on, set on a sports channel that is currently broadcasting the baseball highlights of the day. She watches the fine lines of Mike Lawson as he hits the ball with the bat and sends the ball out of the field in a home run that has the whole Petco Park on their feet and roaring, and convinces herself that the warm appreciation that spreads within her is almost nothing more than professional respect for a nice play.

At her side Evelyn hums her approval. “Very nice. Very nice indeed,” she says as another camera shows the same play and Ginny is not sure if she is referring to the home run or Lawson’s ass, prominently featured from this angle.

Ginny chuckles.

“Yeah, that’s right. Judge me like you aren’t thinking the same thing,” she says and nudges her with her elbow affectionately. “Homewrecker.”

It makes her groan and as if on cue the Padres press room appears on the screen. There is Butch, Sony and Mike, chewing gum exaggeratedly in an excessively relaxed pose with his arms over the backrest of the chairs beside him, like a cowboy from the far west chewing tobacco with his thumbs looped in his belt. It should be completely unappealing but it somehow works for her a little bit.

“Baker has been out this past week due to, and I quote, personal reasons. What is all that about?” a faceless reporter asks.

She would sigh out of frustration but Mike leans on the table in front of him resting his elbows on the wood and a sigh seems suddenly somehow inappropriate.

“You are aware you did say “personal reasons” in the middle of that sentence, right?”

Ginny smiles over the background noise of chuckles and laughs in the press room. He can really be a smartass jerk when he wants to be.

“Mike, I was actually inquiring about the pregnancy rumors. Are any of you going to address them directly?”

Ginny covers her puffy eyes with her hand for a moment out of pure secondhand embarrassment. 

“I’m glad you asked, Tom,” Mike says, and his tone is nonchalant that Ginny literally leans on a little bit hanged on his words. “It has been a very confusing and stressful week for the club, Sony and me, but I can confirm that I am not pregnant. I took the test twice.”

The room erupts in loud laughter. Sony blows Mike a kiss over Butch’s head and he winks back at him as he pretends to catch it. The guffaws fill the sound feed and she tries to contain her grin by biting her lower lip.

“What is _that_ ,” Evelyn asks.

“What is _what_?”

On the screen another reporter asks if the club has a contingency plan in case her pregnancy is confirmed and Mike rolls his eyes and leans his head back as if his mere existence were exhausting. His lycra shirt tightens across his shoulders and chest as he takes a deep breath and Ginny tries not to obviously stare.

“ _That_ ,” Evelyn says gesturing vaguely at her face. “The whole heart-eyes face.”

“I don’t—” she tries to deflect but her friend doesn't let her even finish.

“You totally do.”

“Whatever,” she says to end the discussion and draws the sheets up to her chest.

“No, none of that. Speak.” Evelyn nudges her with impatience. “You are ill and weak, and I won’t hesitate to use it to my advantage.”

She takes a breath and shakes her head lightly. A tired half-smile on her face as she accepts defeat. “It was a sweet gesture,” she concedes. “He was funny and it was a sweet gesture.”

Which is a terrible summary of the meaning behind her smile. It doesn’t say anything about the pictures he bought in secret for her, it doesn’t say anything of the long phone conversations late at night or that one time he kind of offered to buy her tampons. 

Ginny shrugs and sheepishly hides her eyes from the inquisitive look of her friend.

“Oh my God!” Evelyn covers her mouth with her hands, her eyes wide and sparkling like she just found an unexpected present. “You have a crush on Mike Lawson!”

She glares at the other woman with a hint of frustration. “That’s not new information. You’ve known that since forever.”

“I mean that you keep having a crush on him!”

Ginny wants to deny it but she feels too weak, too tired, too confused to choose her words carefully so she goes for the inconvenient truth. “Maybe. I don’t know. Probably.”

The high toned squeal that echoes in the room makes her want to take her words back faster than anything she has ever regretted before.

 

**-264 days**

Ginny never had the chance to have many friends. There was never enough time or she was never in the right place for that, so she learned to be enough for herself and instead, to keep secrets instead of confidences. Nothing big or earth-shattering but little private matters like how the death of her father and the departure of her best friend left her alone in the kind of way that is not cured by the presence of other people, or how the betrayal of her mother, of Trevor, of her brother has made her a little too ready for finding offences in others.

It has given her some rough edges. 

It is not something she usually thinks about, but there are instances where she feels inadequate in a way that makes her think that there are bits of herself that are fundamentally wrong.

She sits in the team bus, two hours and a half ahead until they arrive to the hotel and she feels it on the side of her leg from thigh to kneecap, on the side of her arm from shoulder to elbow, on every part of herself that is too aware of Mike Lawson at her side when she is very convinced that she should, under no circumstances, feel this way about her Captain.

Another little secret to add to her ever-growing collection.

“I’m not saying it like it is a bad thing or anything but it’s definitely a little bit odd. It’s odd,” Mike insists at making conversation when all she wants to do is take a deep breath and disappear. She would put her headphones on and turn herself towards the window but she can’t because God forbid that Lawson lets her take the window seat instead of the aisle one.

Ginny shrugs.

“I mean you have been living in San Diego, for how long now? A year?” Mike keeps going. “And you still live in that hotel? Don't’ tell me they don’t pay you enough to afford an apartment of you own, I know what Nike pays for a contract like yours.”

She looks right ahead of her. She knows that Mike is looking at her but she keeps her eyes fixed right ahead.

“I don’t mind the hotel.”

The bus takes a curve, the velocity higher than usual, and the centrifugal force of the movement sends her right into the side of his body. She feels personally attacked by the forces that rule the universe as she tries to hide the breath catching in her lungs.

This is stupid crush of hers is getting out of hand and she couldn’t possibly be completely truthful with Evelyn about it. It is so ridiculous she feels ashamed of herself.

“I think you are just trying to avoid throwing a housewarming party because you are embarrassed of your teammates.”

She can feel the smirk on his face although she is not looking at him, moving sideways to regain her initial position before the curve, with as much distance between them as can be accomplished.

“Well, you are an embarrassing lot,” she answers after a snort.

Mike seems to take the empty space between them as an invitation and somehow manages to expand, his long limbs crossing to her designated vital space until they are once again plastered to her side, which doesn’t help.

She feels a little flustered, her brain apparently incapable of not focusing on his presence so near to her.

No. It definitely doesn’t help at all.

“Urg,” she whines. It sounds half like a reproach.

“What?”

“You are manspreading.”

“I am not!” he says completely offended, but he takes a calculated look at his right leg pressed against hers, at the miles of abyss between his knees and has the decency to look a little guilty. Not enough to move away though. “I just have long legs.”

“Really?” She is about to make a comment about on him not having balls made of delicate crystal but somehow the words change and rearrange themselves on their way from her brain to her mouth. “I could fit in the space between your knees.”

It is not just the miscalculation of her words but that in her surprise she snaps to look at him, to corroborate the damage of her loose mouth. His eyebrows are high on his forehead and he seems to be forcing himself not to smirk, overtly amused at the double entendre of her words.

She hates him.

She doesn’t hate him at all.

“If you find my knees so reprehensible you are wellcome to go and sit elsewhere.”

She doesn’t have to check to know that all the other seats are occupied by teammates, and teammates’ legs and teammates’ bags.

“There are no free seats,” she says with a half-lidded gaze, full of feigned disdain.

He smiles then, broad and full of himself, like he had just won a battle of some sort. “Then I guess you are stuck with me, Rookie.”

She rolls her eyes theatrically, can’t quite hide her responding smile. “Whatever.”

He nudges her affectionately with his elbow and it loosens something inside herself, his whole face comfortably open and content.

This another one of her secrets: she used to hold his rookie card as a lucky charm. When the boys were specially mean to her or father looked at her disappointed after a bad game she used to comfort herself running her fingers along the familiar crooked edges of the laminated picture. 

The Mike Lawson from her card and her capitan are two completely different people but both seem to have a similar effect on her, like she is no longer on her own, like she can take a leap of faith and _trust_.

“I don’t like to live in a big place all by my own, “ she explains seemingly out of nowhere, “And apartments usually don’t have the kind of security that I need to manage _stuff_.” 

_Stuff_ is the abbreviated term for fan mail, death threats, the occasional stalker and the constant paparazzi intrusions. Being the unrelenting focus of so many strangers’ attention isolates her easily and the familiar faces of the hotel personnel are a comfort she is not ready to give up for the sake of social expectations and appearances.

“I like the hotel,” she sentences with composure.

Mike’s big, brown eyes stare at her like he is measuring her up with a different scale than the one he usually employs, maybe not more caring, maybe not more intense but merely different. She gets lost in it, his gaze feels like it’ll drill a hole that will leave all her secrets exposed to him, but still she can’t take her eyes away.

He finally sighs and turn his head to look away, across the window at the passing landscape but his right hand, big, calloused and heavy finds her left thigh, just above the knee, and pats it softly a couple of times before leaving his palm to permanently take residence there.

She is tempted to put her left leg over his right one to playfully claim some of her space back but she is not sure if she would make the whole ordeal more weird instead of less so. She has little experience with close friendships and navigating the boundaries of physical touch and its many interpretable meanings give her insecurities and headaches.

“I shared a room or a tiny apartment since forever so when I first arrived to the MLB I couldn’t wait to get a big, empty place for my own,” he says still looking out of the window, his voice barely more than a whisper. He sounds like she does when she shares a confidence with herself. “We all have our baggage, Rookie.”

Ginny wants to offer him the kind of comfort his rookie card gave her over the years. She wants to cocoon him and guard him and take his loneliness away as he always does with hers without really trying.

She tentatively puts her hand over his, pats it twice, but her heart races with the contact of their skin and she is not brave enough to leave her fingers rest over his.

She is not brave enough.

 

**-147 days**

It is said that the man is the only animal that trips twice over the same stone, and then there is her mom, who insists on repeating her mistakes over, and over, and over again.

“I’m visiting next weekend,“ her mother makes a dramatic pause over the phone and Ginny is too used to this by now to even bother to roll her eyes. “Kevin is also coming, of course. I hope we can all have a nice dinner together.”

Amelia makes a commiserating face at her when she finishes the call. “I’ll make arrangements at a restaurant that you like.”

Ginny doesn’t think that the place the dinner will take place will have much weight in the surely disastrous outcome, but gives her a little nod of understanding and appreciation before her agent goes back to what she had been doing and the depth of the mess she has just been dragged into sinks completely in.

Ginny groans and lets herself fall face down onto the bed.

“Why do I keep doing this to myself?” she asks, her voice muffled by the sheets and cover. She is a grown up woman, she should have managed to acquire the skills to effectively avoid her mother’s vocal disappointment by now.

“Because she is you mom,” she hears Amelia say with a sweet, comforting tone she rarely uses with anyone that are not babies or puppies.

Evelyn merely agrees with a succinct, “damn right.”

It doesn’t seem like much of an explanation but it is the only one that fits. She doesn’t have an extended family and her mother is her only parent left alive. The fact that they are both incapable of understanding each other and just enjoy each other’s company isn’t apparently enough to stop them from keeping on trying.

Ginny turns around and sits on the bed as Evelyn and Amelia try to agree on the perfect casual attire she should wear to the charity thing later on. These two women that are currently arguing about lipsticks shades and the exact amount of tears her trousers should have add up to at least half of all her support system, and sadly, she can’t ask neither of them to accompany her to this doomed dinner added now to her tight schedule. Not since Amelia’s last feud with her brother made Ginny’s mother take a stand against her. Not since Evelyn got somehow dragged in Will’s mess too.

“What am I to do?” she whines. She resist the temptation to start kicking and punching the floor in full-on tantrum mode.

“Well, you are going to wear this designer jeans with this really overpriced camisole,” says Evelyn signaling to the clothes she is referring to.

Ginny couldn’t care less about the clothes and she certainly has no clue about why what she wears is so important when she is going visiting sick kids, but these are not the things she has a sound knowledge about and she gave up trying to put a fight a long time ago. “No heels,” she demands though.

Both, Evelyn and Amelia roll her eyes with such perfect synchrony that it merits a special mention but both seem ready to give her that much without trying to convince her of the many virtues of stiletto heels. 

Thank god for small miracles.

“Whatever,” Evelyn says with a dismissive movement of her hand. She starts to pick up the runner-up outfits and pass them along to Amelia who methodically and carefully puts them back in their hangers. “And then you should ask Mike to tag along.” 

Amelia stops for a millisecond what she is doing but her face doesn’t give up anything. Ginny doesn’t know what happened between her and Mike but she knows that they were a thing and then they were not, and between one thing and the other Mike did or said something that made her agent a little bit uncomfortable or a little bit resentful.

“That’s what I do when Blip’s mom comes to town and the children aren’t around,” Evelyn continues, possibly choosing to ignore Amelia’s barely noticeable reaction. “He is great with passive-aggressive moms.”

Ginny sits very, very still. “I don’t think it will look well,” she says looking at Amelia, desperately looking for a way out that doesn’t include having to spell out the massive crush that Evelyn knows she has on her captain and Amelia probably suspects.

Evelyn finishes with the clothes and starts to supervise her collection of sneakers and flat shoes. Amelia looks at her dead in the eyes with a particular kind fondness that Ginny finds unsettling. “It wouldn’t look any particular way, Ginny,” she says, and then, “You should ask him. He really is great with moms.”

Yes. Sure. Easy peasy.

The problem is that Mike unknowingly burns her as easily as California’s dry hills in the summer heat and she has to be careful. She still feels weird and tingly all over every time she replays in her mind the way he held her tight in that dance three months ago. She has to be careful because when she is not concentrating on playing or training her brain slips way too easily into thinking of him.

Two hours later she arrives at Rady Children’s Hospital with half of the team, all loaded with toys and all kinds of merchandising of the San Diego Padres, ready to sign, shake hands and smile for selfies.

Ginny didn’t know what she was expecting but the pre-arranged reception committee, formed by the direction board, a handful of photogenic doctors and a couple of not too sick children definitely wasn’t it. There are also lots of photographers and a local TV crew that make Ginny feel cheap and disappointed as she puts her trademark media fake smile.

She must be more transparent than she thought because Shreck leans in as they all pose, the flashes going off without mercy, and speaks near to her ear, hidden from prying journalists’ eyes.

“Just wait till the circus is gone.”

They are magical words because no more than ten minutes later photographers and camera crew are silently packing their things, ready to head out. The suits and the photogenic doctors leave five minutes after with silent, tired faces and Ginny is not sure what it supposed to happen next.

“What now?” she asks to nobody in particular as her teammates slowly scatter and disappear from the hall.

“Now is when the real thing begins,” Amelia says nudging her with a gentle smile. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that she has a very evident soft spot for children. Ginny instead always feels inadequate around them, like she’s supposed to know better because she is an adult but children seem to be able to smell her bullshit the same way dogs smell fear.

She looks around trying to pick up cues but it all seems pretty straight-forward. “Am I supposed to just go into children’s room? Just like that?”

Amelia nods encouragingly. “Any room with the door wide open.” A guy wearing the Padres staff uniform materializes behind her carrying a sack of epic proportions full of the team’s parafernalia with her name or number on it.

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do exactly.” 

Amelia shrugs as she forces her to keep on walking towards one of the hallways full of rooms. She can see three women and a guy dressed all in pink smiling at her from the nurse station and a whole lot of door blatantly fully open. 

“Just talk to them. Sign some things, pose for a picture of two. You will be fine.”

She is not so sure about that. She is legitimately worried that she’d manage to mess some sick kid up. She has never been especially good with kids, not even when she was a kid herself. Amelia helps smooth her way into the first room where a tiny five year old boy with a bandage on his head seems uncontainable excited and asks the right questions to keep conversation going in the second room where a extremely shy nine year old girl barely rises her eyes to her. By the third room Ginny’s confidence has raised up and when in the middle of posing for some silly pictures in room number four Amelia excuses herself to take a call, Ginny feels like she can actually do this.

In the eighth room she finds Sonny and a six year old boy who affirms he is going to be the first astronaut with just one arm. The three of them play a game of uno and when Sonny loses the little boy and her agree he has to walk on his hands along the room in retaliation.  
In the tenth room she runs into Lawson.

He is sitting at the side of the bed with his hands extended over a tray and his beard completely full of little flowers as he listens intently at what the little girl is telling him.

“Hey,” he says when she notices her at the threshold, “Come and meet my friend Joani. She is making me pretty,” he explains solemnly and the girl’s smile is uncontainable, she suspects, very much like hers.

“Hello, Joani. I’m Ginny.”

The girl is wearing a glittery turban that covers her lack of hair and as Ginny gets further inside the room she can see she is painting Mike’s nails with bright colors.

“How do I look?” he asks her, his eyes shining bright with mirth as little Joani giggles.

He looks too big for the diminutive paper flowers tangled in his beard that he displays with his chin up in the air. He looks ridiculous with his massive, calloused hands sporting clashing, vivid colors and his light gray T-shirt stained with finger-painted flowers around his shoulders and biceps.

He looks like her ovaries want to explode.

“You look definitely pretty,” she says and he actually dares to grin smugly. “Good job, Joani. It’s not easy making him look pretty.”

The girl giggles again and she feels a little more welcome, as if she has just been admitted in a very exclusive club.

“Joani is going to be a makeup artist when she grows up,” Mike explains and she takes a couple of steps farther into the room and towards the bed, drawn to him. “What would you do to my friend Ginny here to make her pretty?” he asks the girl very seriously.

Joani looks at her sideways and smiles shyly, leaning towards Mike. “She is already very pretty,” she whispers in that particular way of little children that results in a loud harsh voice.

Ginny snorts and Mike’s eyes open widely as if deeply shocked.

“What? No!” Mike looks at her then, with a roguish half smile that makes her stomach drop. “She is hideous!”

“No, silly! She is beautiful.”

“You think? I don’t know.” He makes a face like he is seriously considering her physical appearance for the first time and Ginny crosses her arms over her chest defensively and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “I think you need glasses Joani.”

The girl shakes her head vehemently. “No!”

“Anyway it doesn’t matter, you know why?” Mike looks at her again for a couple of seconds, his face open and frank, before resuming his adapted discourse for his younger audience. “Because she is really strong. Stronger than me. Like you.”

And just like that her insides shrink and her heart burst skipping a couple of beats. She tries to distract herself by looking at the little girl but her feet are glued to the floor. She feels so attacked and so exposed that she doesn’t dare to move until she has been made sure that she is indeed breathing like a normal, living person.

Ginny wants to run and she wants to hide as each and every alarm inside her head seems to go off at the same time. _Danger!_ they say, _you are most definitely falling in love with Mike Lawson. This is not a drill!_

Her smile is frozen on her face and she feels all hot and cold at the same time, like in a Katy Perry song. Her hands are sweaty and clammy as she excuses herself from the room with some lame pretext she doesn't even care to remember. 

She ends up not saying anything to Lawson and going to the dinner with her mother alone. She regrets every single moment of it.

It is a matter of raw self-preservation but it all feels a lot like self-sabotage.

 

**-92 days**

Ginny grows increasingly tired of promotional and social events. 

Everytime Amelia appears with a radiantly fake smile and a formal invitation in her hand Ginny huffs and puffs to make her discomfort very obvious before even beginning to discuss her attendance. People, it seems, are either overly invested in taking a good picture with her (but not in having any kind of pleasant conversation with her) or annoyingly interested in publicly acknowledging that she has boobs and yet she functions. Neither of those prospects entice her enough to dress up and parade in high heels so she’d rather stay at home.

“Lawson will be there,” Amelia says neither bothered nor amused, simply stating the fact.

“Okay, then.”

It is an unspoken rule that she would probably attend any event if any of her teammates is expected to be there as well. Those chances increase dramatically if said teammate is either Blip, Lawson or Duarte.

“You will have fun in this one,” Amelia promises with an air of motherly indulgence that should bother her more than it does.

The event is some Sports Illustrated party that turns out to be far less crowded with swimsuit models and press than she expected. In fact, if pressed, she would have to admit being slightly starstruck by the amount of golden medallist per square foot politely attacking the buffet tables.

There are pictures, of course. Photocalls are almost mandatory and a few people that Amelia makes sure she meets but otherwise is as close an anonymous get together as Ginny can aspire to these days — drinks with the guys excluded, thank God.

“I want to introduce you to someone,” Lawson says, with a glass of something amber in one hand and a really relaxed stance that it is rare in him outside of the diamond.

She nods and lets herself be led by his hand pressing lightly on the small of her back until someone in her line of vision moves and she sees who it is who they are walking towards. She stops dead on her tracks, her fingers grabbing a handful of Lawson’s upper arm, either for support or as a substitute for an audible gasp.

Mike chuckles and pushes her with a little more intent. “Walk, Baker. You are only going to look weirder if I have to carry you there.”

“Okay,” she says but she is not really okay. She feels suddenly tiny, walking among giants and goddesses as her feet carry her to where her capitan intended.

“Hey, Serena,” he says to, probably the greatest athlete of all times. “Long time no see, girl.” 

Serena William’s bright smile dazzles Ginny, who probably looks like a loony as she hugs Mike warmly and greets him with a “Right back at you, boy.”

“And this is Ginny Baker,” he says with an introductory gesture of his hand, “delivered as promised.”

“Finally! I’ve been meaning to meet you but somehow we have managed to skip each other,” Serena says and takes her hand warmly shaking it with a delicacy that Ginny finds kind of intimidating.

“I—I don’t… go to many events,” she manages to articulate somehow.

Serena smiles back at her and Ginny breathes deeply and reminds herself that she is a grown woman with a successful career in sports, articulate enough to add her two cents to the table and joins the ongoing conversation about personal branding and the risks of social media.

Mike brings her a glass of grape soda and disappears as she keeps talking to people she has admired for the better part of her life as she expresses her opinions carefully. 

Any topic that isn’t baseball always make her slightly nervous, but they also give her pause. She might be less formally educated than she’d like to be but she has always made a point to educate herself whenever possible, to read, to pick up things from here and there, to listen when people talk knowledgeably about anything of interest. But these people, this group of very accomplished people, listen to her talk with an interest that has little to do with getting headlines or gossip pieces in glossy magazines.

She gets introduced to other younger players that talk about struggling with sudden fame or the poisoned apple of being titled a modern role model, they talk about things that Ginny relates in her own way. Friendly faces, that aren’t trying to obtain gain out of her.

She feels comfortable enough in her own skin even when sponsored social gatherings such as this usually never fail to make her feel lonely and inadequate.

Mike appears at her side and leans on, his lips merely inches away from her ear.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asks for nobody else to hear.

“Yes.”

“Good.” His hand lands on her naked arm, his thumb circles caressing her skin in an absent-minded gesture of encouragement. “Amelia said you didn’t want to come.”

She shrugs. “I’m not very good at parties.”

His laugh is loud and throaty enough that people turn their heads to look at them and Ginny tries hard not to blush for reasons that are a little elusive to her right now but that probably have to do with the way she can feel his stomach rippling at her side.

“I’ve partied with you, Baker.” His eyebrows up in his forehead making it all wrinkly in a way that shouldn’t be enticing at all. “You have dragged our asses to hotel bars on a regular basis.”

“That is different.”

Mike looks at her knowingly for long enough that she has to look around the room to distract herself from flushing.

“You are cute when you get all impressed and starstrucked,” he makes fun of her with a sweet but a little condescending tone of voice.

She might have missed a lot growing up but she can smell blood a mile away like a shark. A girl doesn’t succeed among boys without a sharp tongue 

“That’s exactly why I’m never cute when I’m with you, guys.” She bats her eyelashes with mischief and feigned innocence. 

“Yeah, you are completely gross in cleats,” he says without a trace of playfulness in his voice but his eyes gleam as he makes a point of looking directly into her eyes and Ginny forgets to breathe for the briefest of moments.

She keeps it together for about a completely whole minute before laughing it out.

“Has nobody ever told you that fishing for compliments is uncool, Lawson?”

“I’m wearing wash out Vanquish jeans. It is scientifically impossible for me not to look cool in these.”

She wishes she could argue with that, but truth is that he really is rocking those jeans so she hides behind a smirk and goes to find herself a drink stronger than a soda.

 

**-60 days**

It’s been three agonizingly confusing days since _the incident_ at the gym, as she would refer to it in her head if she allowed herself to think about it for more than half a second. The problem is that her subconscious mind seems to have missed the memo and flashes of Mike’s body pressing her against the gym wall assault her brain without any warning on an annoyingly frequent basis.

So this guy she met at the Sport Illustrated thing has been sending her flowers and going with her to some places in a totally platonic kind of way and it has bothered her teammates more than they have any right to. 

Screw them.

She has seen all that before, had tried to make sense out of it for some time before deciding that it wasn't worth it. There is a common overprotective-big-brother complex/I-don’t-want-you-but-why-did-you-choose-him-over-me syndrome that follows her like the plague.

She had only wanted to make Mike say it, to hear his reason to be this aggressively pissed off out loud so she could make fun of the ridiculousness of it all and she had cornered him alone in the gym.

She had not expected to be cornered back.

Ginny gets suddenly hot as she remembers in a flash the feeling of the planes of his muscles over hers, the insinuation of a hard on pressed against her thigh and the smell of him. The radiating heat of his warmth, the tingling feeling of her skin as he breathed over her.

It had lasted barely a few seconds before Lawson had apologised and run away. She has barely seen him since then. 

He seems to have just already left any room she enters or on his way out and their training hours has been escarce and unproductive, leaving her even more frustrated than she already was. His eyes, when he deigns to make eye contact with her at all, aren’t cold exactly, but a little ashamed maybe and completely lacking his usual mischievous shine.

She feels her blood boil when he calls her late at night to talk to her in a sotto voice about the second batter of the Dodgers or the new awful shake his nutritionist made him drink. He sounds close, closer even than he did before and it makes her crave for his presence even more, for the casual contact of their bodies that he has managed to efficiently avoid. She trembles with dissatisfaction over the whole ordeal, her muscles tensed and wired as if she was under an strange case of deprivation syndrome.

It is ridiculous. She feels ridiculous.

Maybe even a little pathetic too. She never had the opportunity to create adequate tools to manage human relationships out of exposure or many past experiences and never mastered the art of being coy or demure to make herself wanted. She knows how to be blunt and upfront, and coping with whatever it is that comes after, but she is out of her depth with subtleties and hints.

“That is not such a bad thing,” says Evelyn encouragingly once she has explained, very vaguely, her struggles. “Boldness can be even advantageous.”

“Yeah. Right,” she answers with incredulity. 

She doesn’t want any kind of advantage, she’d settle for knowing what it is that’s happening with her catcher because in the last days it’s as if he were playing by a new tune that she doesn’t even hear.

Mike might be ashamed or pissed off, he might even be thrown off by the wanting in her eyes that she fears she might not be able to hide. The fear of ruining a significant and successful work relationship, the frustration and the uncertainty of it all are certainly taking a toll on her. 

She feels drained beyond physical exhaustion, and annoyed in a constant, low-key way that reminds her of her teenage self with bad PMS. A really not nice combination.

And yet, when the batter she just outed in the seventh inning calls her a colorful collection of misogynistic names under his breath, and instead of rolling her eyes and letting it go, she throws her glove to the ground, plants her feet and demands that he repeats those very same words in her face, she thinks she is far from being the one to blame.

Scratch that. She is absolutely not to blame. 

The asshole turns around and walks to her until there are mere inches between them, his chest inflated and his chin high in the air as if that could make her back down and run scared. What happens instead is that Omar appears out of nowhere and tackles the asshole to the ground and before anyone knows anything the players of both teams jump to the field as the whole stadium roars.

Somebody pushes her as Butch takes a hold on Omar and Lawson prevents the asshole of the other team from going after him.

“I wasn’t going to _touch_ her, Mike,” she hears him say as Blip tries to get her and the rest of the team to back down and not throw any punches first.

It bothers her that jerks like this stupid guy from the other team would validate intimidation or harassment as long as no fist is thrown. It bothers her much more the underlying fear in the asshole’s face as he excuses himself to her capitan.

The asshole should be afraid of _her_ instead. They all should, really. She can kill any of them with a well thrown ball to the temple, she has the skill and the nerves for it.

“What the HELL, Robles?!” It is the first thing that comes out of her mouth as soon as they all silently hit the locker room with gloomy tensed faces and heavy steps.

She crosses her arms over her chest, her look could probably win a staring contest. She feels like punching a wall and bringing it down brick by brick with her fists.

“What? I was just helping you out,” he looks around, slowly, as if his words were the cue for their teammates to speak out but nobody does, they are either minding their own business or watching them with a guarded stance, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

She takes a deep, deep breath and tries to make herself as clear as water. “I didn’t need your help.”

Omar opens his eyes like she is speaking in tongues and opens up his arms like he can barely contain his incredulity. She has seen this act before and she is far from impressed. 

This is the nice-guy routine and it rightly pisses her off.

“The guy was in your face,” he explains, because for sure, on top of everything she must be unable to correctly measure distances, apparently.

“So was Crawford in Duarte’s three games ago and I didn’t see you jumping to the field to defend his honor.”

“Yeah, but you are—”

She hears some of the guys hiss as she takes a couple of fearless steps and interrupts Omar, poking her accusatory finger at his chest. “If you finish that sentence with any synonym for “girl” or “weak” so help me God I’m going to break both your arms.”

She feels the unfairness of it all over her skin, hot and itchy, it makes her wanna scratch her arms and scream the disappointment out of her lungs.

“That’s enough.” Lawson, grabs her arm and pulls her out of the locker room. His steps are gigantic and she stumbles a couple of times with her own feet as she tries to catch up with him until he pushes her into the first empty office he finds. She is completely ashamed with herself for missing the contact of his hand on her arm when he lets go and crosses her arms over her chest. Mike just steps in and leaves the door completely wide open behind them.

Ginny cringes. She is far from appeased by the implications.

“Cut him some slack, will you?” 

His demand is constructed as a question but there is no room for contradiction in his words. His voice is low and his eyes look pointedly at something behind her, as if she needed more reasons to feed her aggravation.

“ _I_ am the one who should cut _him_ some slack? Jesus,” her voice trembles with indignation and it sounds small instead of contained. “He is the one who was acting as a jerk!”

Lawson crosses his arms over his chest, and Ginny can almost feel them pressed around her own arms, holding her, pinning her. And the thought, the memory, makes her heart rate double its frequency while he keeps very deliberately not looking at her.

This is ridiculous. God, so, so ridiculous.

“I know.”

“Then why are you here talking to me instead of talking to him?!”

She wants him to look at her in the eye. She wants him to look at her in the eye. God, she wants him to look at her!.

“I will, okay? I will,” but there is a hint of hesitation in his voice and that makes her uneasy. It sounds weird. It sounds like a lie of omission hidden between precarious truths.

“What is it?” she demands.

Mike takes a slow breath and lowers his head to look at his own feet before rising it again and finally looking at her.

If the air catches in her throat it’s just because she feels like she has aged two centuries since they entered the room. Nothing more.

He looks tired and a little bit exasperated, like the whole sum of his patience is being tested. The memory of those eyes inches away from hers, his mouth a breath away from hers, is still too fresh and it raises goosebumps all over her skin.

Damn!

No. She has not worked her whole life to get into the major leagues for this. She clenches her hands into and toughens up.

“The guy has a crush on you,” Mike says in a single breath.

Ginny shrugs. “So?”

She is royally unimpressed.

It’s not that she means to be insensitive but she has a big crush on the guy in front of her, she is even slightly in love with him, but that doesn’t mean that she tackles people to the ground, or messes up games because of it.

“So maybe next time you bite his head off you could do it a little more gently so that I don’t have to collect his tears with buckets afterwards,” he says with a cold, angry voice and she wonders how many times has that happened before. 

She guesses enough for it to bother him this much.

Ginny doesn’t owe the boy shit just because he has some silly feelings for her but she nods curtly. She doesn’t want to be wrongly accused of creating discord among her team players again. For some reason, that one never seems to go away.

“Okay.”

She doesn’t say “whatever you want” but she’s mortified to think that the sentiment is written all over her instead. Mike just stares at her for at least a full minute before he glances back at the open door with a tired breath and Ginny seizes the chance before it slips between her fingers.

“Do you want to talk to me about any other thing?”

He doesn’t hesitate. “No.”

It sounds like a losing score.

 

**-29 days**

Mike announces his retirement an anticlimactic Tuesday with undramatic warm weather.

Ginny feels like she is suffocating inside her own skin as he finishes his crappy speech to the team before summoning the press. She doesn’t cry, her eyes don’t fill with tears, her nose doesn’t run. 

Nothing that hadn’t happened to her before. People leave. She learned that a long time ago. The hard way.

So she claps dispassionately with her teammates when Mike finishes his talk and then she coverly grabs her headphones and goes to hit the gym. If she squeezes her fists so tight that her finger hurts and her feet stomp the poor floor of the hallway all the way there, that is nobody’s business.

She doesn’t even bother stretching, puts her headphones on, Foo Fighters blasting in her ears as she starts to run on the mill as if her survival depended on it. She is somehow convinced that one day it will.

Any day now, really.

She runs hard and fast, sweat breaks on her forehead and on her nape, she feels her blood pumping in her veins and her lungs burn slightly but she keeps pushing it. Tries not to think, her whole brain focussed on going faster, on keeping the pace, on the familiar rock lyrics. 

Lawson appears out of nowhere in front of her treadmill, arms crossed over his chest and looking as pissed off as if she had kicked his puppy, moving his lips in what she assumes are stupid demands that she can’t and doesn’t want to hear. When a couple minutes later he hasn’t moved a single fucking inch away she decides to get over with whatever this is about as soon as possible so she can keep on with her punishing workout and general day.

Ginny rolls her eyes theatrically and takes her headphones off.

“What?” she barks almost out of breath before she pushes the button to start to slow down.

“You have some fucking nerve, Rookie,” he says ill humored and the sum of all the times he has chosen not to spread his legs in the bus or not to bump her arm with his or not to slap her ass in the last two months make her want to smack his face in the sodium powder plater. 

All the times she had tried to get a word out of him about his sudden estrangement color her apparent indifference.

“Whatever you say, _Captain_.”

The treadmill finally stops and she takes her towel and puts it around her neck to take care of some of her sweating, cleans her face with one extreme and shakes her legs, turning to go to the ropes and the hell away from the conversation.

“It’s not like I expected a farewell parade or anything but a kind word and a pat on the back would have been within the confines of human decency.”

She snorts, fuck Lawson and his fucking way with fucking words. 

“You are not leaving for a month yet.”

But he is leaving. The team. Her. Whatever. It kind of is the point.

“Gee, Rookie, don’t get _so_ emotional,” he says sarcastically.

“I’m no longer a rookie.”

“You will always be my last rookie.”

Of all the things that he could have said, that is the one that get stuck in her throat. She stops and stares and forgets about the ropes momentarily.

“What does that mean?”

He takes a deep breath, shakes hi head and shows his hands up in a helpless gesture. 

“What do you think it means?”

She has no idea. She doesn’t really care right now, doesn’t dwell on the almosts and the not-quites when there’s the impending fact that she is going to be left behind, A common pattern in the story of her life. 

“You are going away.” Her voice sound too soft, breakable, childlike. She hates it. She tilts her chin up feigning indifference to compensate it somehow.

“I’m retiring,” he clarifies. To her ears it sounds the same. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She crosses her arms in front of her and puffs a little theatrically. He looks earnest enough, his eyes doing that doe thing that they do when he is trying his best at being sincere and she so desperately wants to believe him that she is going to break her own rule and take his word for it on this matter. 

“Okay.”

Mike sighs, as if a dead weight have been lifted from his shoulders, relieved, which sets her in motion. She takes a couple of steps and grabs his arm right above his wrist just strong enough to prevent him from turning around and going.

“You know you have been an asshole these past months, right?”

She is looking for a tiny piece of vindication. The validation that she is not overthinking things, changing the shape of this _whatever_ between them into something only she recognizes.

Mike gazes at her hand on him for a couple of seconds more than necessary and it makes her suddenly awkward, extremely aware of the touch of his skin. She still doesn’t let him go.

“I wouldn’t say an _asshole_ , exactly.”

He seems a little embarrassed with himself, as he should. 

“A complete jerk, then.”

He laughs a little at her emphasis, looks at his shoes as he shakes his head slightly. she lets go of his arm.

“Yeah, well. Yes.” He looks at her in the eye and right up until that moment Ginny wasn’t aware of exactly how much she feared he was going to keep on avoiding her. 

Mike sighs and brushes the gigantic palm of his hand against his whole face. “Look, could we just forget the last two months and have some fun for the rest of my remaining time as a professional baseball player?”

Forgetting is not exactly in Ginny’s nature. There hasn’t been anything that she hasn’t tried to forget before that hadn’t have make a spectacular comeback to bite her in the ass.

“I guess,” she says a little insecure. At the very least she guesses she can postpone the conversation she craves for another month. “Yes, okay.”

Mike nods, looks around as if suddenly realizing where they are and nods again with a little more of conviction. 

“Okay then. I’ll see you later in the field.”

He turns around with his hands in his front pockets. She has watched him leaving a room a thousand million times but for some reason this time triggers something in her, a kind of anxiety that can’t be easily contained.

“Lawson!” she shouts out before she knows what she is doing. He turns around but neither of them closes the distance between them. The need for any kind of explanation, as whim as it might be, gets the better of her. “Did I—?” she interrupts herself to rephrase her question. “Were you mad at me?”

She is proud at how matter-of-factly she sounds. 

Mike squints a little, looking at her sideways as if trying to decipher her true intentions up until his shoulders slump a little, probably deciding that there are none.

“No, I wasn’t mad,” he says patting the doorjamb a couple of times. “I’m just too old to pull your pigtails.”

 

**-1 days**

For the last game of Mike Lawson, legend catcher for the San Diego Padres, the field looks greener than green, the sky bluer than any blue Ginny has seen before and the Petco Park it’s completely packed with exhilarated fans that seem to be having the time of their life even before the game itself begins.

Lawson’s name and number are written a zillion times around the stands, in homemade banners and expensive memorabilia, and she really doesn’t have the time to count the marriage proposals scratched down in t-shirts and improvised posters but there are a lot.

A LOT.

It’s total madness and she can tell by Mike’s face that he is loving all of it. The press frenzy, the psycho fans, the camera lens that won't leave him for one minute, as the giant screens focus on him and him alone, changing from headshots to more general ones in which Lawson still manages to be the single protagonist of the whole deal.

He smiles sideways, grins and winks knowing that the image will be broadcasted — the bastard. His playfulness is contagious and Ginny finds herself grinning before remembering that she is actually a little devastated that this will be their last game together.

He trots down the couple of stairs of the dugout before her and his knee creaks loudly enough for Ginny to hear it but he doesn’t cringe, like it never happened and when they both sit at the bench she puts her hand over her mouth and asks without looking at him.

“Is your knee okay?”

He looks completely nonplussed. She is still not looking at him but some genius has decided to put a little window at one of the corners of every giant screen with a permanent feed of him.

“Good as always,” he says. Makes her wonder if she is imagining thing or if he is so used to pain by now that it doesn’t even register.

He sprawls on the bench, claiming more space than he has any right to, but Ginny refuses to give in and pushes her legs apart, their tights clashing against each other, pushing hard, fighting for the space until Ginny finally gives in, and puffs audibly crossing her arms over her chest.

“You’re being childish,” she says.

“Whatever.” 

And then he proceeds to very slowly unbend his knees claiming even more of her space — which is ridiculous — and bumps into her pushing her a little along the bench and against Blip.

“Are you serious?”

“Stop whining, Baker.”

The image, when it is up on the big screens is ridiculous, his enormous leg seems to be splayed almost over hers and he looks like a giant as her face is barely visible behind his shoulder. He winks at the camera and arches his eyebrows and the whole Park roars as if it were the funniest thing they have ever seen.

She tries very hard to remain annoyed but she has missed him too much in the last few months and the warmth of his body against hers is entirely too distracting.

Everything’s too distracting, because she has been putting some things on hold, things like confronting Mike about the gym thing and about the hallway thing and about the whole kind of cold shoulder thing. She has been making an effort to postpone whatever she has to say to him, whatever she might want from him in favor of this day and all of that is rushing to her now, in a stadium full of people that would probably throw her under a bus to get a high five from the asshole sitting next to her.

“Is he being an insufferable jerk or is it just me?” she asks Blip, loud enough for Lawson and half of the bench to hear her.

“My ass still stings from his latest slap,” the other player answers with angry resignation.

“You two are such delicate, little flowers.”

“Fuck you, Lawson.”

“Yeah, fuck you, man.”

In the field, Shrek bats and runs to the first base and their protests drown in the celebratory noise.

“Well, if I can’t be an asshole in my last game as a professional baseball player, what is the meaning of life?”

Al chuckles. “Spoken like a true poet.”

Her head is definitely not on the game to day.

Ginny is suddenly thinking how Al’s last game as a professional player might have been. How hers will be. She is now thinking about those words the coach said to her not so long ago, how baseball is just a small part of what her whole life would be but she can’t imagine, she has no clue who she might be outside of the game, what she might do.

She feels a wave of cold anxiety running through her and unconsciously scouts minimally closer to Lawson.

He looks at her for a quarter of a second before returning his gaze to the game and his ongoing romance with the camera.

“Are you getting moppy on me there, Baker?”

She shrugs. “Shut up.”

When Duarte’s time to bat comes, Mike gets up and holds him by the shoulder, getting serious in his face. The image being broadcasted with bright intensity as Lawson forces his closeness on the younger guy. To the untrained eye Lawson looks ready to give a heartfelt and meaningful last game advice.

“Are you trying to kiss me or what, Lawson?” Duarte says bothered, his annoyance translating to the screen as big time intensity. Ginny is sure that the image feed is going to be trending topic in about 30 seconds with cheesy hashtags.

Mike just nods gravely, as if contemplating his words carefully.

“I wouldn’t kiss you ugly face to safe my life, Duarte, but I’ve heard that there are some very realistic inflatable dolls with my face to help you fulfill your dreams,” he says lightly, his face, sober and solemn for the camera.

Blip snorts and Ginny rolls her eyes.

The ass slap Duarte receives as he goes to the field is hard and loud with a full hand that ends in a little grab. His anger is definitely showing when he bats sending the ball to the far right end.

“He is going to murder you in your sleep.”

“Nah,” Mike diminishes. “It’s my last professional game, it’s like a get out of jail pass.”

Blip leans on and cover his mouth to avoid getting his lips read. “Fifty bucks say he is going to wake up to a dead horse head in his bed.”

By the fifth inning, it’s blatantly clear they are going to lose miserably, although the public doesn’t seem to particularly care by the way the keep cheering and chanting restlessly. In the eighth inning they recover miraculously in a way that Lawson insists is due to his unwavering charisma and the Gods’ favor to him and him alone.

By the end of the final inning Ginny is physically tired and mentally exhausted. Her right arm is tense and burns with the effort of throwing yet another ball; she is sweaty and a little fed up with all the times the game has been interrupted by a fan trying to make a run on the field.

This is it. This is the end. The last time Mike Lawson will be her catcher and maybe she should be appreciating it more but she has no energy left to really care. She prepares for his signal but instead he gets up from his positions and trots to the mount.

“What is it?” she barely bothers to cover her lips with the globe. 

“I’ve prepared a little speech.”

“What?” 

She can barely believe him, except, of course she does and of course he has prepared a speech.

“Is it long?”

“Nah, it is more like an advice, a code of living, a higher moral rule.”

“You are so full of it.”

The whole stadium is looking at them and Ginny is barely aware that the tension in the air mirrors that disastrous first game together.

“Here it goes: always eat red M&M’s last.”

And then he just nods and runs back to his position leaving her to wonder what the effing fuck.

He signs for a curveball and she delivers. she delivers like she hasn’t delivered anything else before, beautifully and theatrically as the guy misses the ball and the game ends with the San Diego Padres ahead in the scoreboard by the smallest margin mathematically possible.

There is some music, loud and festive blasting from the audio system of the Petco Park and serpentines coming from God knows where inundate everything. Thousand of fans chant Mike’s name and they walk towards each other with complacent smiles in their faces.

“What was that M&M’s shit?”

Mike puts his arm over her shoulders as they start to walk towards the dugout and the rest of the team.

“That was my last advice as a professional player, and what you’ll have to say to the press when they ask you about it, which is going to be hilarious.”

She hits him, lightly with her glove because the press is so going to ask that question. Ginny puts her own arm around his waist, their steps naturally in sync.

“I’m going to miss this, Baker.”

And she doesn’t know if he means the game, the field or them because she is a little too emotionally drained to ask and deal with the answer, but the picture they paint is so stunning, with the air filled of little papers of different colors as they walk away, that it makes the covers of all sports magazines and some that are not.

She keeps a copy of the picture in her own scrapbook.

She also buys like twelve copies of Zero magazine with plans to stick them all over the clubhouse’s walls. The cover is a glossy image of Duarte and Lawson inches apart, looking at each other intensely, and Mike’s hand really going for it with Duarte’s ass.

It is also a very pretty picture. 

 

**4 days**

Ginny might be young by many standards but she has lived quickly and worked hard, and it has been a long time since she learned that nobody was going to give her anything that she didn’t demand, even if it was something fairly due to her. 

She has stomped her feet to the ground and called her cavalry of lawyers to demand her rightful share of profits by the use of her image. She has crossed her arms over her chest in front of the team manager and asked for the same benefits her teammates had. She had fought long and hard for a spot in the major leagues owed to her by her skills and her work.

She never learned how to get anything by being coy and subtle, she wouldn’t even know where to begin if she were to try the circumspect approach but she is completely sure that she would feel ridiculous and small.

And she hates feeling small.

“This is driving me nuts!” Evelyn had said with a mix of excitement and irritation that only she could pull off. “Just ask him to his face!”

So yes, Ginny had come to terms with the fact that as in any other aspect of her life, if she wanted an straight answer from Lawson about the current state of this weird thing between them, she was going to have to demand it too.

And so they had drunk, they had danced, they had talked at the fancy retirement party the Club had thrown him and when the time felt right, she had cornered him into admitting that he liked her. The declaration had been anticlimactic and mundane. 

“Yeah, sure, I like you, Baker.” 

That was what he had said when she had confronted him about his weird attitude for the last weeks. A little bit like an afterthought, a little bit like an inoffensive statement without consequences.

_I like bacon, I like the beach, I like you Ginny._

He hadn’t said _that_ , but it had been almost implied by the bored tone of his voice.

They had been dancing to a slow tune, in nice clothes and when she had asked what did he meant by that, he had mildly mocked her.

“I like you–like you,” he said not really looking at her, as if trying to convince a petulant child to drop the issue and be content with what she already had.

So she had nodded and said a quiet okay and nothing much.

A couple of days later she had been hot and bothered, completely unable to drop the issue in her mind until she had drunk a couple of beers, grabbed a handful more and presented herself at his house under the excuse of watching the exhibition game of the Raven against the Mets.

“And??” Evelyn asks over the phone. 

Ginny can imagine in detail the interest painted on the other woman’s face and, for once, she is glad that they are not both on the same room to talk it out. This conversation would be much harder face to face. Instead, she can hide behind the phone, extending silences to school her voice without having to play it cool with her face too.

“We made out,” she says matter-of-factly, clinical even, not giving up the slight flush she can feel rising to her cheeks.

She had said she liked him–liked him too, just to try the mocking tone herself but it had come out all wrong, and they were both seated on the floor by then, their backs against the sofa and the TV in front of them. Mike had completely frozen at her words, as if the joke was lost when the roles were reversed and she had had a couple of beers, she saw something on Lawson’s eyes. Thought she saw something on Lawson eyes and leaned on to fully kiss him.

“What?! Where?”

“In his house.”

“Details, girl! I’ve been married since forever and I obtain the high doses of romantic excitement that I require from other people’s lives.”

Ginny snorts. Her romantic life is hardly prolific and certainly not that satisfying for her, so she doubts it could sustain the both of them. And she is not good at this, the over-analyzing every detail, every little gesture, elaborating theories, talking about what might have beens for days and days.

Evelyn thrives on it, much to her dismay, but Ginny likes simple things and relationships that are not that hard to figure out.

“We made out on the floor, by the couch, and then you husband called saying that he was going to pick us up in ten minutes and that was it.”

That about sums it up. She doesn’t feel like dwelling into the fact that he had seem reluctant to kiss her back, at least in the beginning, before she had lost the best part of her rational mind and straddled him while exploring his mouth with her tongue.

At the other end of the phone Evelyn makes a sound that could be a hiss. “I love my husband but I might have to kill him.”

“Okay.”

“So what now?”

That is the big question, right? The elephant in the room that nobody ever wants to acknowledge. The great _what now_.

“I don’t know.”

Evelyn gasps and it’s funny how outrageous she sounds in that little intake of air. “What do you mean you don’t know? You made out!”

“Which probably can be said about Mike Lawson and half the female population of this town. I wouldn’t entirely rule out the male population either.”

“Yes, we all have seen that picture with Duarte.”

She really doesn’t like to talk about that picture because it reminds her of the other picture, the one with the two of them side by side walking off the field. She has spent too much time staring at that picture, studying the contours of their silhouettes and remembering the feeling of his heavy warm arm over her shoulders.

“Anyway,” she says at last. There is not much else she thinks she can say.

“But you like him, right?”

No.

She most definitely doesn’t like Mike Lawson. She might have liked him a couple of years ago, she liked him when she was in the minor league, she had a crush on him when she was a teenager. This is something else, this suffocating need for his presence near her doesn’t fit in a little “I like him.”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“Maybe you should tell him, like ripping a bandaid off.”

Ginny feels a little cold all over at the thought. She is not a fan of subterfuge but she is even less of a fan of feeling vulnerable and completely exposed. She is pretty sure it would feel more like getting hit by a truck than like ripping a bandaid off.

“I don’t know. I just miss being close, you know? The bad jokes and the talking about bad reality TV on the bus.” Evelyn doesn’t know. She couldn’t know. She has her husband and her sons, her sister and her friends. “I don’t have that many people,” she explains.

And it’s true. It’s mostly true, anyway. She would give up any expectation of something else if she could have his easy, comfortable friendship back, instead of this thing in which he seems to be constantly walking on eggshells around her.

“So, what are you gonna do?” asks Evelyn. She sounds genuinely concerned and it makes her slump her shoulders, that her friend could hear the frank sadness in the voice enough to drop the silly gossiping attitude.

“I don’t know.” She really, really doesn’t. “I guess I’ll play it by ear.”

She sighs and hopes for the best.

 

**8 days**

The place is as pretentious as one might expect from a club that has a incomprehensible sign instead of a name composed of legible letters. There are dancers hanging from cages around the place and the waiters wear neon chokers around their necks, that alone would have made Ginny turn around faster than lightening with a “Hell no” in her lips, but it is sadly just the tip of the iceberg.

“What the fuck is this place, Salvi?” Blip mocks as the whole group gets directed to the VIP area.

“Is that a guy dresses as a bird?”

It is. It surely is. Ginny snorts and grabs Duarte’s leather jacket sleeve so to not be left behind as they walk among the mass of people that crowds the place. 

“You guys have no sense of fashion whatsoever.”

It is too warm, the decorations too bright and the music is so, so not to her liking, but the place is supposed to be the hottest spot in town and Salvemini has always had ambitions regarding his birthday celebrations.

They cross the dance floor like Moses parting the seawater to reach the black marble stairs at the far end and they settle in a palco type of area where they can overwatch almost all the place. The dancers wear minimum items of clothing move extravagantly in their cages at their eye-level, the intermittent flashes of light make them look like they are suffering some kind of seizure. 

“So, this is the hottest place in town, uh?” Ginny comments making a point of dragging her look around. “And yet you dare to ask me why I don't go out more.”

Duarte snorts and makes her swirl around to end up letting himself fall in one of the neon colored leather puffs that are spread all around the VIP area.

“It’s not that bad, Mami.” 

They are served imported champagne and complicated cocktails by a couple of guys wearing an excessive amount of glitter.

“What is wrong with a normal bar with normal beer?” asks Shrek mostly to himself as he struggles to seat.

Ginny knows the exact moment Lawson makes his entrance in the club, half an hour late like the diva he claims to be. There are loud whoops and the people down on the dance floor seem to gravitate towards the space he leaves behind as he moves. He stops for selfies and poses smiling like a movie star, she watches him get approached excitedly by girls and boys that insinuate themselves with little restrain. It is almost a marvel that he makes it to the stairs that lead to the VIP area.

Ginny doesn’t leave her spot. She swings the pink, peach flavored cocktail in her hand and keeps looking at the dance floor leaning on the ostentatious baroque rail. The people downstairs are not much younger than herself and she wonders briefly if in another life these would be her people, with their obnoxious clothes and non rhythmical movements.

“Checking out my adoring masses?”

She feels him approaching before he makes an appearance in her vision field, which is very corny but true nevertheless. He leans back on the same handrail she is leaning on, his forearm supporting the weight of his upper body.

“You are such a fucking diva,” she says as way of hello. Her tone is more playful than harsh.

“What can I say, I am adored whenever I go,” he answers with a smirk. “It is my blessing and my curse.”

“It is a curse all right. I can’t even turn on the TV without watching your ugly face on it.”

It has been impossible to miss him since he retired, not yet at least, with all the special commemorations to his career filling the pages of newspapers and magazines adding to the already extensive TV coverage.

“You are just jealous because you can’t grow a beard like mine.”

“No human being should ever be jealous about that.”

His laugh is barely audible, drown in a sea of terrible music, and it dies as soon as he catches her eye. The banter is suddenly gone replaced with something heavier, more present, unavoidable, as Ginny finds the air is too humid to breathe comfortably. They blatantly stare at each other for five, eight, twelve seconds. Neither of them moving.

“What are you two doing here?” Blip comes out of nowhere and Ginny can’t make her mind about if she is relieved about the disruption of their little bubble or incredibly frustrated. Maybe a little bit of both. “There are shots on the table with your names on them.”

She drinks, dances with Duarte to a beat that is not entirely terrible, jokes with Salvi about old age and his brightly, golden clothes, and drinks some more cheering loudly arms in arms with Shrek. She doesn’t keep an eye on Lawson. She actually takes a sip of whichever drink she has at hand every time she feels tempted to scan the room and see what he is up to, which is probably how she ends up pretty loosen up by the time Mike makes himself unavoidable with a bottle of water in his hand.

“Take this. You’ll thank me in the morning.”.

“I don’t know Lawson, I like to enjoy my bad choices right till the end of the night,” she says but she takes a step towards him and takes the bottle from his hand anyway. 

The distance between them is ridiculously close, dense, charged. She is not wearing high heels and she has to look up to him a little so she looks mainly at his lips as she unscrew the cap of the bottle and takes a long gulp of water.

She knows what she is doing. She knows _exactly_ what she’s doing.

She is not so clairvoyant as to what comes next, thought. Her palms are a little sweaty, her fingers cold from holding a drink and she wants to run them up and down his spine just to see his reaction.

“I don’t think you have had much time to get many of those under you belt, Baker,” he says her name like it’s a dare.

She is vaguely aware of the people around them. Of the team, Salvi’s friends and other guests that had joined them in the VIP area. This is not who she is, she isn’t careless, but the frustration of the last two months has been piling up, restrained only by the club code of conduct and now there is nothing there to stop her. 

No-thing.

She watches his Adam’s apple bob as Mike swallows and she wonders if his mouth feels dry, if his palms are equally clammy, if he is as eager to touch her as she is to touch him. That thought makes her warm and invincible.

Courageous.

 _Cheeky._

“Maybe you could help me scratch off some items from my bad girl to do list.”

Mike’s breath catches in his lungs, she sees it, she is so close that she can almost feel it. Close enough to get burned. There is an unreadable look in his eyes before she can see him squaring his jaw, shaking his head as if it was the conclusion of some inner dialogue and turning away from her.

She knows is not an invitation by any stretch of the imagination but she follows him anyway, out to the hallway that leads to the emergency stairs and the vip bathrooms, the loudness of the whole place fading as they exit the VIP palco.

“So,” she says loudly, over the music’s bases that are mostly background noise out here. 

Lawson turns and looks at her with an intensity that gets stuck in the back of her throat. He looks bigger under this light, like a colossus that could lift her up and make her fly. He looks like he is waiting for her to hand him a death sentence, He looks exactly as he did when she dreamed about him back when she was fifteen years old and nothing at all like that, altogether.

For some reason Evelyn’s voice telling her that being bold could be an advantage plays itself in a buckle in her mind. 

“So?”

“You owe me an ass slap,” she says, dead serious. She has no hidden strategy here but to get him to put his hand on her ass and maybe his tongue in her mouth.

“What?” He sounds a little strangled and completely full of shit. He arches his eyebrows exaggeratedly but she does know how to read him to some level and that is fake surprise if she has ever seen it.

“That last game,” she clarifies anyway, “you gave every damn member of the team an ass slap but me.” 

He looks around sheepishly, presumably to check if they are still alone in the hallway and takes a couple of steps so that she doesn’t have to keep speaking so loud. 

“You even gave the _janitor_ an ass slap,” she accuses. “Everyone but _me_.”

“His name is Brian and I’ve been slapping his ass since before you had teeth. He has a superb ass.”

She leans on, gets on the tip of her feet too for good measure, until her mouth is just about an inch away from his ear. “Bullshit,” she pronounces carefully, slowly. “ _I_ have a superb ass.”

They aren’t touching anywhere but not a week ago they had been making out on the floor of his living room and she could remember it with vivid clarity. It’s like constantly adding gasoline to a small fire.

“I came here to collect.” And with that she takes his left hand and presses it against the right cheek of her ass.

He hesitates and she tries not to find that sweet. He is probably not as invested in this thing between them as she is but she knows he is moderately attracted to her. She has caught some meaningful glances at her aforementioned ass along the years. He hesitates, for a moment, looking deeply into her eyes as if trying to find there prove that she means what she says, which almost makes her snort. She wouldn’t know how to make this deep crush of hers, cutely convoluted even if she’d care to try.

Finally, he seems to make up his mind and actively grasp her ass, his fingers claiming the area with assertive strength. 

Ginny grins.

She pushes him against the wall, just beside the girls toilets door at the same time that he pulls her against him and they collide, against each other, against the wall, they just collide and Ginny feels it on every inch of her skin, like an amplified echo. She tips her chin up and kisses him.

His mouth tastes like that pretentious japanese beer he was drinking, which she doesn’t particularly like, but who cares. Her hands roams along his shoulder that seems to extend for miles and miles and miles, as she tries to get closer. 

He is wearing cologne, not much, but to her nose it is pretty distinctive as it’s used to the smell of him clean from the shower or covered in dust and sweat. She likes it. The smell of him and also this subtle artificial scent that reminds her of fancy sports events. She would like to lie him down and run her nose all along his naked body to figure out where he has chosen to put the cologne.

Maybe some other time. She kisses him with impatient hunger and he kisses her back with obscene dedication, slow and deep, consuming her.

It really shouldn’t work, but it does. 

God yes, it does.

She tries to smoothly rotate them to push them both across the nearest threshold and into the girl’s bathroom without breaking the kiss but he is like a fucking mountain, heavy muscle mass everywhere and his feet doesn’t move of their place in the ground.

“What are you doing?” he asks, his lids still half closed.

She sighs, it is quite a sight.

“Get in here,” she orders as she takes a couple of steps back pushing the door open with her ass, making him follow her by grabbing the front of his shirt with both her hands.

She doesn’t even wait for the door to close altogether before going for his mouth again. Her hands tremble ever so slightly as they creep under his shirt until the pads of her fingers touch the naked skin of his lower abs.

He groans in her mouth. Then a gasp as she keeps assaulting his chest painfully slow with cold fingers. Her right leg climbs up to his leg until it is perched around his hip almost on its own accord.

“Baker,” he growls on her mouth, as a warning, but his hand warms the skin underneath her skinny jeans as his hand wanders from knee to hip and back again. 

She bucks her hips against his in response. She never cared much for warnings, anyway.

Mike breathes deeply and the intake of air in his lungs makes his chest grow three sizes, as if it wasn’t already ridiculously big, and Ginny plasters herself to him. Then everything shifts as he spins them around, her back hits the door with a blank force that is all noise but that leaves her breathless in the all the best ways nevertheless.

Mike takes half a step back, the air that fills the space between them feels extremely cold and annoying as he covers the sides of her face with his hands, his thumbs caressing the soft skin at the base of her ears as he looks intently at her for a couple of seconds before speaking again.

“I am not going to fuck with you in the bathroom of a club,” his voice sounds as if that is exactly what he wants to do. “I’m way too classy for that.”

It’s possible that she falls a little more in love with him just for how he has chosen to phrase that sentence, but she is well over class and propriety. 

Ginny Baker has hardly been accused of being a proper lady, anyway.

“Well maybe I’m not,” she sounds breathless and not even vaguely ashamed for it. “Like I said, I like to enjoy my mistakes till the end.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, well—”

He doesn’t let her finish. His mouth starts at her own mouth and then it starts a little trip along her jaw, her ear, her neck, while his hands start to work on the button of her jeans and she feels a wave of excitement, warm and wet, starts to pool between her legs.

When he pops the button open she gasps so loudly that for a moment she is convinced that everyone outside must have heard her. Mike takes half a step backwards, lips part, his pupils black and dilated as he seems suspended into inaction by forces that Ginny doesn’t quite understand or care to acknowledge. 

“God, you are beautiful,” he says in a rush, almost as if it was only a word, murmured as the air leave his lungs. Almost as if by accident.

Nobody looks beautiful under white fluorescent light, but in that moment she believes him. She would believe anything that he would say to her in that voice.

“Come here,” is the only thing she dares to say back for fear of breaking inside out. She leans to kiss him, with less frenzy than before and he doesn’t back down, doesn’t step back. Their lips meet again, softer this time.

He slips his hands underneath her top, his fingers curl around her waist and then they start to toy with the loosened waistband of her jeans. 

She should be smarter than this by now, she knows better than most that anybody with a cellphone is a potential paparazzi and that everything leaks eventually but Mike bites her lower lip at the same time that his hand finds the space to get under her jeans, under her underwear, until the pads of his fingers finds her, wet and ready, and God no, she can’t think at all.

She grinds against his hand with full force, rotating her hips, creating friction and she anchors herself to him, her hands, grabbing handfuls of his shoulder, his back, his biceps as she makes herself silent covering her mouth with the side of his neck.

She comes hard and fast in less than five minutes, there are a million of tiny electric storms along her skin and her heart beats so loud that it is all she can hear. She feels so warm and relaxed that when she throws her head back to lay it against the door she has to bite her own lips to avoid saying something corny and lovesick that would surely ruin everything.

“You okay?” Mike asks.

She just hums in response. Her face is still a little flushed as he kisses his way up her neck.

“We should get going or somebody is going to start looking for us.”

She doesn’t want to get going, she doesn’t want even to _move_ just yet but the bright light that is impossible to avoid insists on reminding her that they are in a very public place and that this has been a very bad very good idea.

Mike takes a step back, swiping his hand clean against his jeans and engaging his rumpled shirt.

“What about you?” His shirt barely cover the bulge of his crotch. “That must be uncomfortable,” she says pointing vaguely with her chin.

He simply shrugs it off, as if it was an everyday occurrence. Who, knows, maybe it is. Maybe this is the way all his clubbing nights ends.

“I’ll go out first. Just in case.”

Ginny nods and moves out of the way so he can open the door freely. She looks at herself in the mirror as she pulls up the fly of her jeans. Her hair looks terrible and the basic makeup she was wearing is a mess, she’d better clean it off with some water than try to fix it.

She counts to ten, and then to twenty. Before she makes it out of the bathroom she makes a pact to herself to not overthink things.

She takes a deep, deep breath and goes back to Salvi’s birthday party.

 

**18 days**

His hands roam the naked skin of her waist with light caresses as they kiss with a slow deepness than should be unnerving but that as it turns out, it’s quite the opposite.

She is down to her sport underwear, comfortable but unflattering and he still has his jeans on, unbuttoned and barely hanging from his hip bones. All the lights in her room are switched on but she can’t find it in herself to care much about it. She cares about the seven feet that separate them from her bed though, she cares deeply about those feet and how to make them disappear. 

Her own hands explore the whole expanse of his shoulders and his back, trying to coax him to move with her to the mattress but he remains stubbornly in the same place, not giving up even a small inch.

“You know, for a guy that used _signs_ in a professional capacity you can be pretty dense.” She takes his hand and pulls but still he holds his ground. 

“But affirmative consent is so hot,” his voice hoarse and low making the words unseemingly sexy.

“You just want me to talk dirty.”

“I’m not gonna deny it’s a definitive perk.”

Ginny releases his hand to put her own over her hips, and tilts her head as if contemplating her options. “If you come with me to the bed now and take the rest of the clothes off, I will gladly sit on you face for the rest of the night.”

She intents it as a joke, as an evidence that his ridiculous partiality to wording every intention could backfire on him but his pupils are dilated to a point where she would be concerned about a concussion if the circumstances were any different, and his stupid facial expression is one of absolute delight and not one of nuisance.

“You can’t take it back now,” he says as he walks towards the bed, pushing his jeans all the way down while doing so. “Except you totally can. I might be a pervert but I’m not that kind of pervert.”

Ginni snorts. With an unaffected gesture she takes off her bra and go to press herself against the wide expanse of Mike’s back. She kisses his shoulder blades, bites the taut shape of his trapezius muscle.

“Really? And what kind of pervert are you exactly?”

He half turns, takes her arm and pulls with decision until she is flying and landing on the mattress. She erupts into giggles as her body bounces with the controlled force of impact. Mike grins but there is nothing humorous in his smile, it is predatory, and the look he gives her as he kneels over the bed galvanizes her in a way she has never felt before. 

“The kind who is going to spend the rest of the night with my head buried between your thighs.”

She laughs loudly, a little nervous that he might not be exaggerating his intentions. She takes a deep intake of air when he first kisses her inner thigh, trying to tone down her anticipation.

The pads of his fingers invent patterns on the skin of her hips as his mouth leaves a wet trail in its way up her leg and her knees fell open wider by their own accord. She is incredibly turned on, she can feel her face and her chest radiating heat like the sun, her heartbeat racing up and her own fingers entangling in his hair to have something solid to grab when he first starts licking her.

 _This is not sex_ , she thinks suddenly. It _is_ sex, clearly, but it also feels like something else entirely to her. Like the lazy, intense way his fingers play at her entrance and his lips move against her clit was the main event for the night — the only event for the night. It constricts her heart, the focused intimacy of his touches, makes her feel too light for gravity and uncontainable in her own skin.

She has never felt like this before, and later, hours from now, she will wonder if she would feel like this ever again if Mike were removed from the equation.

 

**48 days**

She convinces herself that this is what she wants. This casual sex, no strings attached, probably non-exclusive thing. She is young, she never went to college and she is a professional athlete with little time to waste on dalliances.

This makes sense.

This is totally what she wants.

And yet, sometimes when she’s not being careful, she yearns for other things as well. 

Like when they were talking on the phone the other day, bitching about the absurdly long Christmas season to come, and she could imagine the two of them sitting in his living room with their pajamas on, watching crappy TV until ungodly hours on Christmas Eve, with such detail that she dreamed of the scene for days.

Or when she is grabbing a shake with Evelyn and she leans on and asks, “How are things with Mike?” with the kind of tone used for secret romances and global conspiracies, and Ginny shakes her head, rolls her eyes and answers her for the umpteenth time that, “It is not like that,” but the words taste sour in her mouth and her stance is far from as relaxed as she is feigning it to be.

Sometimes she craves the little things that everybody seems to have the right to enjoy except from her, like maybe doing something very stupid at a party or talk very rudely to annoying strangers that demand her smile.

Other days, this _thing_ with Mike is the only thing that keeps her together. 

Two weeks ago they had sex in his car. She had insistently asked for it, and at the time it had felt like a lifesaving experience; to be careless, stupid and free, if only for a brief time, if only in Mike’s walkway between the garage and the fence where virtually no one could watch them.

His hands, calloused and rough groping her as they’ve tried to make enough room in his stupid convertible to take some essential clothes off.

They are both too big for the car, and Mike had claimed to be also entirely too old, but he hadn’t complained much after she’d managed to push his jeans down his hips and straddled him after switching seats.

She had tried to make it last as long as humanly possible. The low car roof forcing her to bend her neck in a way that had left the long column of her throat exposed, and her breasts, at a very convenient position, in line with Mike’s mouth.

They hadn’t been able move much, she had barely been able to rock her hips at leisure and her left leg had been kind of bended in a not so comfortable way, but the space had been so full of them, of their warmth, and their smell, their perspiration, their arms and legs. She had felt full, free, connected. 

Maybe sex in a car was some sort of rite of passage that she really needed to accomplish, in order to get her head out of herself for a little while.

And now, two weeks later, her mother has called to comment on passing that she had planned to spend Thanksgiving with Kevin’s family and that, given that she was always so very busy, and in such a fine company — not to mention her current more-than-tense relationship with her brother — she was going to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve with them too.

She doesn’t know why she lets her mother hurt her this much but she does. Enough to down almost a whole bottle of some sweet white wine and convince herself that going to Mike’s house while drunk is a perfectly acceptable way to socialize.

She tells the Uber driver to stop at the back entrance, knowing that he usually leaves that fence door open and lets herself in. She walks along the paved road to the front door of the house. She has mastered keeping her body vertical as she strolls but the straight-walking part of it all ends up being very difficult to pin down. She is so preoccupied by her walking-pattern that it doesn’t occur to her that he might have company until she has already banged her fist against the door.

There is a silence then, a stillness that lets her hear the quickening beat of her heart in her ears and at least one female voice coming from inside the house. She has almost decided to hide behind the bushes like the adult she is when the door opens wide before her.

She, very dignifiedly, stumbles to the side.

“Okay,” he says resigned, ushering her inside and very pointedly not commenting on the way she can’t walk without zigzagging.

“I don’t want to impose.” She doesn’t slur much, thank God. “You have company or something, probably.”

She goes as straight as she can into the kitchen, discretely, and sits on one of the stools with much care. Avoiding the living room is pivotal to her improvised plan of not scaring away whomever Mike might be entertaining. 

She can still hear the voice, louder now. It’s a nice voice, although it seems different than the one she heard before.

Mike follows her from a distance, doesn’t offer her any help verbal or otherwise as he leans on the doorframe and contemplates her. He is barefoot. He is always barefoot. For some reason she can only focus on the way his feet cross at his ankles casually.

“So, very good, or very bad night?”

His tone is quite neutral but he hasn’t taken a step into the kitchen yet and even with her brain slowed down by the alcohol she can identify the physical distance between them as an unmistaken sign of his annoyance. His arms are crossed over his chest but he is dressed in a grey cotton t-shirt and yoga pants, hardly an attire thought to impress female company. She can’t be causing that much of a setback in his plans.

Whatever.

His passive-aggressiveness annoys her too.

“You are being an ass.”

“You are the one currently drunk on my kitchen. Insisting that I have _company_.” He claps his hands sharply twice and the voice disappears along with the light in the living room. It is only then that she realizes she has been hearing the TV all along.

She breathes out a hoarse wheeze and lets her head fall on the kitchen island counter, soundly. 

“I can go,” she announces.

“I’m sure you can.”

She knows he is rightfully pissed off, but she doesn’t want to apologize, much on the contrary, she wants to taunt him and antagonize him for no apparent reason. 

She wants him to fight her.

Mostly she wants him to care. Yes.

“Are you pissed off because I'm drunk, because I’m here or because I implied you were a manwhore?”

Turns out Ginny is a surprisingly articulated drunk, and maybe she didn’t exactly imply that he was a manwhore the first time but she feels adding a little bite to her barking is needed.

Mike doesn’t even flinch.

“Yes.”

At the moment this is all that she has. This dumbass, bearded, barefoot, pinetree of a man. Tomorrow she’ll also have a hangover. And baseball.

No friends from college or high-school, no old teammates, virtually no family.

She has Amelia and Scott for as long as she pays them and she has the Sanders who already left her once before.

Under the fake bravado provided by the alcohol, she is scared shitless.

“Stop looking at me like I’m a petulant child,” she demands.

“Stop talking to me like I'm the one you want to fight with.”

It also worries her that she could be this crystal clear transparent to him. It is hardly convenient.

She can't quite focus her sight on a fixed point so she keeps looking around the kitchen, trying not to get sick enough to vomit. Her brain can’t stay fixed on a thought either and it keeps coming back to his naked feet and a memory of his naked feet on her small couch on her hotel room, and how barefoot means beach, or pool or home.

“I think I should get a house,” she drags the vowels far more than necessary for correct pronunciation. “Nothing stupidly big like this, but you know, somewhere to be barefoot.”

She used to love living in a hotel; the lack of much empty space around her usually prevents her from feeling acutely lonely, with people always around 24/7 wandering around too, but recently her room has started to feel suffocating, like outgrowing an old pair of sneakers.

“I think I’m outgrowing my room,” she proclaims.

“Okay.”

He finally decides that the door frame can probably survive without the constant support of his upper body and walks swiftly across the kitchen, takes a big glass, fills it with water and sits on a stool. Not the stool immediately next to her though, the next one. He stretches one arm over the counter casually and leaves the glass in front of her, his hand rests casually inches away from her own hand and Ginny would like to take his fingers in hers, just to hold them and feel their warmth. 

She doesn’t, of course. She just sometimes craves for things she can’t have, as previously stated. Yeah, things that are simple and easy to get for others, or at least that is what she’d been told.

“God, Pop would have hated you.”

It seems out of the blue, but in her mind it is the only logical conclusion to a wandering thought.

“What are you saying?” he seems a little offended by her statement. “Parents _love_ me.”

He says it like that, stressing the word, adding more o’s to it than it would usually have. 

Ginny takes a long sip of water, and then a smaller one.

“He hated distractions,” she admits.

Her father would have also hated any guy who would have had any romantic or sexual intentions towards her probably. That it is what she imagines because he died before she could bring any boyfriend home and observe the reaction.

She never ended up bringing home any boyfriend home, anyway.

“You remember I was also a great player, right? Of baseball? That sport you said your father loved?”

“Meh.” She looks around the kitchen. It’s pristine. She knows he likes to cook sometimes but she has trouble imagining him being this neat. Coming to think of it, whenever they used to sleep out of town his hotel rooms were always quite tidy, she just always assumed it was somebody else’s doing. “My mother loves you, though,” she confesses. “And she really likes you. She loves me too but I don’t think she likes me that much.”

He doesn’t automatically responds that it can’ be true and it’s definitely one of the things that she really loves about Mike: his lack of false pretenses.

“Did your mother call?”

“Aha,” she acknowledges and then nods vehemently her head just in case. “Which was perfect because I was already having such a great day. Do you know who I met with today?” she gestures vaguely with her hand to her current attire. Black jeans, red silky top. Nothing too fancy but definitely not her default sports clothes. She doesn’t wait for him to answer her previous question. “I met Jordan Collings of all people. Jordan Collings! Can you imagine? I said to myself that it would be nice to catch up, you know? But no, no catching up. He just wanted to warn me that he’s been approached by a bunch of journalists to talk about how we used to be best friends.” She takes a long sip of water. Then another. “Yep, the juicy story of how his father killed my father with all the gory details, that’s what they want. And the worst part is that while I was sitting in that, that… bar, I couldn’t really recognize him, that guy that sang Katy Perry with me in the car and was my best friend. And maybe he didn’t recognize me either, who knows?” 

She takes a deep, deep breath but her eyes fill with tears anyway, and she can’t stop them from falling and rolling down her cheeks. “It’s so sad. Sadder than my brother stealing money from me and acting like I’m the one to blame. Sadder than my mother not wanting to spend a single holiday with me.” She tries to wipe the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hands but the little bastards just keep coming and coming out of her eyes. “So I am going to buy my own place and I’ll close the door and none of them will be able to enter, not even the staff to clean the room because there will be no staff.”

Mike’s hand moves over the counter, reaches hers and takes it. Just takes her hand. Just holds it, not too loose, not too tight, and it only makes her cry harder, until she is sobbing pathetically and uncontrollably.

“Listen Baker, I’ll sing along with you even though you completely destroy any Katy Perry song that you attempt, and I will spend every holiday with you until you are so sick of me you’ll ask for a restraining order, okay?”

He gets up, takes a step, maybe two as she keeps crying and then his arms are encircling her from behind, crossing over her front, engulfing her as his chin rests on the top of her head. 

She cries. She simply cries for minutes and minutes until she feels empty and dry from inside out.

“Come on, why don’t you go lay down for a little bit upstairs while I finish down here.”

She doesn’t really know what she is supposed to do but she feels terribly tired and unfocused, so she takes the stairs and lets herself fall right in the middle of Mike’s bed, clothes on, shoes on and everything.

Ginny doesn’t remember falling asleep but when she next opens her eyes the room is brightly illuminated with sunlight. Her mouth tastes like some small, nasty animal has been living in it for a while and she is only occupying a side of the bed. Her head hurts. She’s had worst hangovers, yet she groans and turns around sticking her face under the pillow for some more blissful minutes.

The air smells faintly of bacon and pancakes, and that is the only thing that finally makes her get out from under the covers and out of the bed. She is still wearing last night’s clothes, now all wrinkled and smelly-looking, just the perfect outfit for a proper walk of shame.

Her feet are bare on the wood floor. They look as she imagines they would at a place she would call home.

Sometimes, Ginny’s mind drifts away, thinking about the things she doesn’t get to have.

 

**60 days**

She makes a list of _Things to do before the year is over_. It’s the day before New Year’s Eve and Ginny decides she wants to accomplish something moderately remarcable — by low standards — before the present year is over and done with.

Ginny sets the alarm clock early in the morning, goes through her usual routine and then she packs a bottle of water and some basics, and takes an Uber to the Mission Trails. 

She has been meaning to try the Kwaay Paay Peak Hike for quite some time now. 

It is not a long trail but it is tough enough to be something of a challenge, even more so after having already done her morning workout. It is cold, peaceful and dusty, and she enjoys every step of the way, from the breathtaking views from the peak, to the gravel filled road down from there. The fact that under the visor of her nike cap she remains unrecognized by any fellow hikers or bystanders only adds to the charm of the place.

She makes it all the way to the parking lot before turning the sound of her cellphone on again and then she stops on her tracks. Her leggings and her shirt are slightly wet on the places she has sweated the most, her hair is a mess and she is covered from head to toe in dust; thirty feet away from her, Lawson half seats on the hood of his expensive car looking like an impersonator of James Dean if he had lived long enough to reach his thirties and had had wide broad shoulders. He is slurping some blue, sugar filled smoothie and ignoring the discreet smartphone pictures and the stares.

She is not yet used to his shaved face but she has to agree with the target group of the sports program where he is an anchor now: it makes him look young and handsome by the most conventional of standards.

Too young and handsome, even, in a way that it is completely unfair for the rest of men his age.

“Are you for real?” she asks smiling as she approaches him. The people that had been politely staring at him are blatantly gazing at them now, so she takes her cap off and cleans the dusty sweat out of her face and her neck with a hand towel. If she is going to be all over the internet she’d much rather prefer doing so while looking moderately clean.

“What? Did you want a smoothie too?”

“If you were going to come all the way here you could have hiked the trail with me.”

“Absolutely not. I don’t even try that hard to accomplish my own New Year’s resolutions, why on Earth would I try to do yours?” He slurps some more, the sound annoying and childish as his leather jacket screams _troubled teenager_. “And this wasn’t even a New Year’s resolution, it’s a Still Going Year resolution, which is not a thing.” He snorts. If he is aware of people slowing their pace when they walk by next to them he is contagiously unbothered by it. “Besides, Baker, I think hiking is horrible and only acceptable for people who have a complex about their height or mental issues.”

Ginny rolls her eyes, crosses her arms over her chest and sits beside him only to see if he will flinch away from her dusty, dirty clothes.

He does not.

“God, you’re weird,” she says, pretending to be resigned but ending up sounding a little in awe. It would be mortifying if she would allow herself to dwell into it.

“Shut up.”

A polite cough interrupts their silly banter. Ginny has heard that very same noise in restaurants, supermarkets, and even the waiting room of her gynecologist enough times to recognize when a stranger is about to ask something of her. She turns a little following the source of the cough: a dirty blonde thirty-something with a real need for a haircut and an arm around a kid about ten years old.

“Hi. I’m sorry to bother you. My kid here is a big fan and I was wondering if we could take a picture with you.”

The sun is on her face blinding her almost completely and she has trouble identifying if the guy is looking at her, Lawson or the both of them so she waits for a couple of seconds for Mike, with his flawless, designer sunglasses, to give her any indication or lead the way.

“I’ll take the picture,” Mike says, his easy-going demeanor suddenly gone. Ginny has never seen or heard of Lawson being anything but charming with the fans but his words just sounded like reinforced steel, the same way she imagines they would if someone had just insulted his mother.

“Actually, my father has always been a big fan of yours, so maybe you both could be in the picture?”

Ginny notices that three or four feet behind the kid, there is an older man with a white short beard and his hands in his front pockets, that looks as far from pleased at the idea of taking a picture with them as one might be of undergoing a root canal. Not exactly the poster picture of “being a big fan”.

“Sure?” she ventures, not sure how to address the situation. When she looks back at Mike, his face is expressionless and tense she feels like she overstepped somewhere, somehow with that single word. 

“Come on, Dad, don’t be shy.”

The group gathers together awkwardly for the picture, with the kid in the middle and the rest just trying to get in the photo without alienating anyone’s personal space. Mike’s arm over her shoulder feels like concrete, like the weight of the whole world concentrated in one spot. It makes the muscles of her back and her legs tense up in a weird Pavlovian response.

As soon as the screen of the phone goes black and the device disappears from in their line of vision, the group dismantles. The kid seems ecstatic and Ginny smiles at his lightened up face and his cute squeals of joy before nodding a non-committal goodbye to his father. Mike is already inside the car grabbing the steering wheel with both hands when Ginny opens the co-pilot door.

“You _are_ weird,” she says trying to resume their light hearted banter, and maybe reset the mood to before that tension-filled fan interaction.

He doesn’t start the car. He doesn’t answer to her either, just keeps looking ahead to nothing in particular with his hands around the wheel. She touches his arm carefully, as she have seen been done in the movies to people who was supposedly on a trance or possessed or about to turn into a giant insect. 

Whichever might apply.

“Mike?”

“That was my father,” he says matter of factly, and then presses the button to start the engine and drives out of the parking lot as if the Earth hasn’t just shattered out of its axis a little.

“I didn’t know you—”

She stops herself before ending that sentence. Ginny was a straight teenager girl once, with his poster on the wall and every personal information about him stored in her brain like a treasure, like a guarantee that they belonged together in the fantasy land of professional baseball and romantic fairy tales. She knows there was never any mention of his father but to clarify that he hadn’t been part of the picture, ironically. She and the rest of the world have just assumed as true the old cliché of the accidentally knocked-out girl becoming a single mother.

Finishing her sentences wouldn't have conveyed any of that because _I didn’t know you knew who your father was _, sounded extremely inadequate and judgy to anyone who might hear those words together and issued in that precise order.__

__“I didn’t know you kept track of him,” she rectifies out loud._ _

__“I don’t. Not anymore.”_ _

__Her hand is still on his arm._ _

__They get into the Interestatal 8 headed to Dog Beach and in the twenty minutes that it takes for them to arrive there, neither of them speak another word, not until the motor is silent again and they are parked in front of the sand dunes where kids, runners and old couples walk around with their pets._ _

__“Does he know who you are?” she asks carefully, afraid of saying something that could scar them both deeper than burning metal._ _

__She is untrained for this too, for people trusting her with their personal secrets. Usually her screwed up family are the biggest drama in the metaphorical room._ _

__“He knows. He has known for a long time.” Ginny nods but she is not sure he sees her. His head still fixed staring straight ahead as if still driving but she can’t assess his gaze behind his mirrored sunglasses. “He has just never been interested in me. Not even for the money.”_ _

__It is inconceivable to her that anyone would choose not to know him given the opportunity. She moves slowly, as if any sudden movement could make his pain explode and kill them both. Ginny sits at the edge of her seat and leans so that her head is resting now on the side of his shoulder, sweat and dust and messy hair._ _

__“You don’t need him”, she says. _I’m here for you_ , she doesn’t._ _

__“But I did.” His admission is raw in its honest sadness._ _

__She doesn’t know what to say in response that could sound comforting and not scripted out of a cheap drama TV movie, so she says nothing._ _

__Outside the car people laugh, and talk and shout. Dogs bark. It is all white noise in the distance. She concentrates on the sound of his breathing and forces her intakes of air to synchronize with his in a silent demonstration of solidarity._ _

__She closes her eyes and lets her hand rest on his knee and wishes that she could be enough for him too._ _

__**72 days** _ _

__The news break on a Saturday morning._ _

__Amelia had called her the night before to give her a heads up, to tell her not to worry, to assure her that she was working on it. Nevertheless, the morning sport shows all opened with the same headline: Livan duarte was leaving the San Diego Padres allegedly because of a love quarrel with Ginny Baker._ _

__The quiet offseason was killing sports news producers brain cells all over. What a damn tragedy._ _

__She puts her headphones on, blasting Sia, and goes to run ten miles before her weight lifting and stretching routines, then she makes it back to her room unbothered. It’s in times like these that it is so convenient to still live in a hotel; the multiple exits and the never-ending hallways always playing in her favor when she wants to avoid people, even if lately she has started to seriously consider making an investment in a house. Nothing fancy, or big, something with a good security perimeter and maybe a yard._ _

__She takes a shower and asks room service for her special brand of “a little of everything” breakfast before Livan finally decides to give her a call._ _

__“You’re an asshole,” Ginny says without really meaning it, or maybe meaning it but not resenting him for it. “You are going to leave me and our five children,” she jokes._ _

__At the other end of the line, Duarte snorts loudly. “What can I say, Mami? You have changed, you don’t pay me enough attention anymore, it’s all about the children now.”_ _

__Ginny lets herself laugh in a moment of feigned oblivion. There has been discrete movements, hushed talks, calls that Livan took carefully in private. She’s been around long enough to pick up the signs of a team player trying to make an unadvertised move out._ _

__“I’m sorry, Mami,” says Livan finally and this time, there is nothing playful in his voice. “The opportunity is just too good to say no.”_ _

__Ginny sighs, shakes her head to herself. “Don’t worry, Papi, everybody leaves eventually.”_ _

__That could be the title of her unauthorized biography._ _

__She feels the familiar hole in the general area of her stomach, the tickling itch in her eyes that comes with the welling up of tears and the uncomfortable constriction of her throat that makes it difficult to breathe normally. She knows all those symptoms with intimate familiarity by now, sadly, and she looks around her grey, impersonal hotel room and counts her blessings for her current living arrangements. It makes her feel a little less left behind somehow. Nothing is permanent, everything is in different stages of temporality after all, even herself._ _

__“But you are gonna miss me right?”_ _

__“Everyday I won’t be beating your ass on the field.”_ _

__Amelia calls her again to advise her to not to go out for the day._ _

__“The paparazzi are going to be after your scent today. I’m going to make make some calls and release a statement later on. Tomorrow will be better. I promise,” her voice reassuring and calm as she explains a situation that Ginny could have predicted on her own._ _

__She prepares herself some tea and silences her cellphone with the intention of spending the rest of her day in media lockout. Apparently, in the world of gossip and unconfirmed sources, the weird logic is that if Livan is indeed leaving the San Diego Padres, the rest of the headline must also be true, and the pull of an alleged secret romance between team mates with dramatic consequences is just too strong to resist for the journalists and the media out there._ _

__And she refuses to even acknowledge what the trolls on twitter might be fretting about in the Internet. She has already been there and done it enough times to have learned that particular lesson._ _

__Ginny dodges calls and messages like a pro and only answers Evelyn’s. Their back and forth lasts for two and a half hours as she lets the other woman distract her with anything and everything that she comes up with, including but not limited to: clothes, disastrous pumpkin recipes, that new sushi place that the boys like so much, Blip’s latest creative way to put his foot in his mouth, kitten videos in the internet and that album RDJ released that Ginny had completely forgotten about._ _

__By the time the night has fallen, she finally surrenders to the lure of the world outside her room and turns the TV on. She can’t even pretend that is accidental the way she goes straight for the channel where Lawson’s show airs, although it could be argued that it is a limbic response._ _

__Her breathing is shallow and slow as they go through other sports news, the closest thing to holding her breath for twenty minutes straight until finally the unavoidable question comes, like a missile with a target that seems to be painted on her back._ _

__“The Dodgers and Livan Duarte have finally released a joint statement, and it seems like the Cuban catcher is indeed leaving The San Diego Padres and will be playing for the Los Angeles team next season. Mike, you know both Livan Duarte and Ginny Baker, how much truth do you think there is behind the rumor that a break up between the players is responsible for Livan’s leaving?”_ _

__The close-up on Mike looks like something that belongs to a horror movie. His smile is so fake that he could impersonate the Joker, and the hard lines around his eyes make him look as if he were attempting to mind-control the masses. Any other day she would be laughing her ass off at the weird picture._ _

__“Look John, I do know them both and I know they are both very professional players. I wouldn't claim to know the full spectrum of reasons that Duarte has for deciding on joining The Dodgers. Maybe he has a massive crush on Steve Yeager, maybe he doesn’t. The point is we shouldn’t care, we should focus on how this will affect the line-up of both teams. Ginny Baker is a tough, hard-working player and Livan Duarte has amazing cheekbones, and they will be playing for different baseball teams next season, that is all I can say for sure.”_ _

__She watches the rest of the show and when the credits start to roll she counts to one hundred before calling him._ _

__“I didn’t know you paid so much attention to Duarte’s facial features,” she says as soon as he picks up. She could have just thanked him but the words would have probably come out of her mouth all cheesy and corny, and she doesn’t feel like she could deal with that kind of thing right now._ _

__“They pay me to talk about this kind of things now.”_ _

__“I don’t think they pay you to talk about Livan’s cheekbones.”_ _

__“You haven’t read my contract. I have to do real deranged things to earn a living these days.”_ _

__Ginny laughs, more than the joke deserves. She welcomes the attempt at lightening the mood of a day she surely wouldn’t count among one of the best of her life. Sadly, she can’t help to hear the heavy silence of things unsaid too, and it feels like the double bladed sword of Damocles waiting to cut both their necks._ _

__It’s the things they hide behind the jokes what will kill this thing between them in the end._ _

__She lets the seconds go by in silence, as she focuses on the background noises of his end of the line: doors opening and closing, steps, other people saying goodnight._ _

__“I am tired of this shit. Aren’t you?” she asks because she remembers the media frenzy after he split from his wife and doesn’t understand how anyone could cope with this kind of thing while going out through a divorce, and still not having committed any violent crime._ _

__“Enormously. But you know what they say: it is the price to pay for being awesome and extraordinary.”_ _

__This time the joke falls flat. She would like to have a word with the one who established those prices._ _

__“That is bullshit.” She has already paid her pound of flesh, over and over again, and in return she just wants to play baseball and be left alone to her own devices. “I just want to be like anybody else.”_ _

__“Nobody is like anybody else, not really.”_ _

__He is right, but Ginny is not in the mood to consider philosophical implications._ _

__“You know what I mean. I want to be allowed to do normal stuff without the world setting a debate about it. Not having to buy Tylenol on the internet because if I set foot in a pharmacy I might as well be admitting that I’m pregnant — or being able to pick up a guy at a bar without it ending up on TMZ. Ordinary things.”_ _

__Both scenarios has happened to her, when she was younger and stupider, a little too naive for her own good._ _

__“I must say it has been quite some time since the last time I was pregnant in the tabloids,” Mike says. Ginny hears how he tries to muffle the phone to give directions to his driver. “And I’ll let you pick me up at a bar. I promise I won’t spill the beans on TMZ but let's face it Baker, there is nothing ordinary about picking me up.”_ _

__She rolls her eyes._ _

__“According to some publications picking you up is one of the most ordinary things you can do in San Diego, it’s practically in the tourist guides.”_ _

__“According to some publications the Earth is flat and Robles has been impersonated by an alien robot.”_ _

__She laughs a little, careless, as if it were any other day. “That one might actually be true.”_ _

__Ginny has never said it out loud to any other human soul but she feels most acutely alone when the public eye focus its mean attention on her. It's not the critics or the nonsensical hate that gets her, but the feeling that not only nobody knows her but also nobody is interested in doing so. It wouldn’t sell more papers and it wouldn’t gain more clicks._ _

__“Where are you now?” she asks_ _

__“The studio driver is about to leave me at home, why?”_ _

__She bites her lower lip and doubts only for the split of a second that it takes for her to start talking again._ _

__“Well, I’m not in the mood for getting dressed and going out to a bar, but it would be very nice of you if you could let yourself be picked up. Here.”_ _

__There are some muffled noises and the distant sound of car door closing before she hears Mike’s voice again. “Okay, lazyass. I’ll be there in twenty minutes, but I’m not cheap, I expect to get your mini-fridge raided. All macadamia nuts are now officially at my disposal.”_ _

__Ginny hangs up and goes to take a look at the list of prizes corresponding to the contents of her mini-fridge out of curiosity. Each little bag of nuts costs 12 dollars._ _

__She smiles. That is the kind of exorbitant price that she is gladly willing to pay._ _

__

__**92 days** _ _

__Her brain has the stupid occurence of having a panic attack just when Evelyn and Amelia are unreachable and in her hypoxia-induced confusion, her mind decides that calling Mike to ask him to come and help her is actually a good idea._ _

___It is so late that it could be considered early morning, but Mike comes to her hotel and her room anyway. She opens the door to him with her eyes red and puffy from the effort of just trying to get breathable air in her lungs and he sighs as if he had just witnessed a puppy being kicked._  


There is a strong possibility that she might look as bad as she feels.  


Mike holds her, close enough that she can focus on the rhythm of his heartbeat and his breathing instead of on the way the wired up muscles of her chest are trying to asphyxiate her. He whispers sweet nothings in her hair that she’s not sure are intended for her to hear until her breathing stars to regain a passing resemblance to that of an adult human being and they both move to the couch with slow, careful steps in the darkened room.  


She sits and puts her knees up, braces herself as he holds her on the small piece of furniture. She feels confined but strangely better. She breathes deeper under the weight of his arms and his upper body, as if without it the open space of her room would suck the air out of her lungs, like a vacuum, like outer space.  


“Is everything okay, Rookie?” his voice is so soft that it almost doesn’t break the comforting silence. “Is the new pitcher giving you hell?”  


She sighs. The new pitcher is but a pebble in her shoe. “Yes. But it’s not—” she interrupts herself. “It’s okay.” 

__“Okay,” he repites unconvinced._ _

___“I think is just accumulated stress or something.”_  


It’s definitely something.  


It’s the world crashing on her, cracking her meticulously made armor to hurt her where she is weak and vulnerable. Her brother is asking her for money yet again and her mother wants to use her name to help her boyfriend gain some leverage at a risky investment. Amelia wants her to greenlight a project about a biographical mini-series whose mere concept gives her the creeps, and Evelyn has asked her to take a side in her current marriage war about having or not having another baby.  


Everybody wants a piece of her and she is afraid there will be no pieces left when they are done.  


“Anything I can help you with?”  


She shakes her head no because she doesn’t trust her voice not to break saying the word. She needs everything from him with an intensity that scares her so she ask for nothing. She leans her forehead on her knees and counts to ten in her head. She does that a couple of times, daring the monotonous mathematics to put her back together, to give her the strength to be enough for herself and for everyone else.  


No man is an island, they say, but nobody said what a woman should not be.  


He puts his hand on her nape, his strong fingers sprawled along the skin of her neck and she feels all resolve leave her body. He disarms her so easily that it should be alarming.  


“Ginny?”  


“I miss you,” she blurts out, unintended. It’s like bleeding feelings, painful and draining and life consuming.  


“I’m right here.”  


“Now.”  


It’s not enough, it hadn’t been enough for quite some time. It’s like being permanently on hold, like Christmas morning before opening gifts or being permanently on diet and in front of a steak. Others might call it excitement but she is just figuring out that this casual sex thing is adding anxiousness to her life instead of taking it off. She has to be guarded around Mike, she has to be careful not to step over the imaginary boundaries of their non-romantic relationship.  


He keeps on rubbing her nape. It’s like the unique code to unmake her, the secret autodestruction command.  


“Hey, I—”  


“I got used to have you around, okay?” That sentence barely conveys her meaning but the rage she feels at herself for saying the words can be heard in every syllable. “I got used to your shitty pep talks and your misguided sense of humor. I… miss you.”  


She thinks about those last weeks before he retired. She completely misunderstood her attachment to him back then, miscalculated how much she would crave his presence while going through her day, not only at work but also while doing the most mundane chores.  


“I can give you a shitty pep talk right now if you want.”  


His words fall upon her like freezing water, the light tone of his voice as he issues them. Ginny makes an effort and looks at him in the eye. There is a trace of humour there too, not only in what he have just said, almost half a smile in the corners of his mouth.  
She gives up.  


She is painfully cracking herself open, showing him the insecure, small, weak person that takes residence sometimes within herself, that hides behind the baseball and the brave smile and everything else, and he is purposely avoiding to address her declaration, defusing her feelings with a joke.  


“No.” She takes a small breath. Rebuilds her armor, cements her cracks. “I’ll be alright.”

__

__**94 days** _ _

__Evelyn Sanders decides that enough is enough one late afternoon. She picks up her cellphone, her purse and the carefully crafted business plan she had been working on for the last few months and seeks refuge in Ginny’s hotel room._ _

__They order some food and a lot of alcohol from the hotel kitchen and they both take off their shoes and sit on the floor instead of sitting on the good-for-nothing-couch._ _

__Ginny had never seen Evelyn voluntarily remove her designer shoes before._ _

__“Are you going to leave Blip?” she asks, the thought more than a little upsetting. These people are her north as real functional relationships go now that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are no longer an item._ _

__“No,” Evelyn doesn’t hesitate a moment. “But I think I need a little time and a little space to remember who I am aside from being a wife and a mother, what other things make me happy in this life.”_ _

__Ginny nods, even if she’s not sure what she is agreeing with, far too distracted by her own confusion and her own emotional pain to be of any good assistance._ _

__“Do you want to crash here?”_ _

__The other woman sighs, half relieved, half sad. “Yes, thank you.” And then shakes her head and picks the bottle of pink gin by its thick neck discarding her glass for good. “Crashing at a hotel room without so much as the thought of sex involved. I feel old.”_ _

__Ginny could crack a joke about not ruling out such a thing, but she doesn’t. She feels too blue to make it work._ _

__Amelia comes between her third and fourth glass of vodka tonic. She takes a look at the both of them, leaves the latest network proposal lying around the kitchen counter and takes her shoes off too._ _

__“So, one of those night, uh?”_ _

__Evelyn nods and takes a sip from the bottle she hasn’t left since she first picked it up. “It seems so.”_ _

__Amelia serves herself a vodka on the rocks and sits on the floor besides Ginny. She puts her hair up in a messy bun artfully held together with a pen and slumps her shoulders. She looks like an entirely different person like that._ _

__She looks like a real friend and not someone on her payroll._ _

__“I really need to get a house with at least one guest bedroom,” Ginny says._ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__“Definitely.”_ _

__“And maybe some ridiculous enormous bathrooms that look like a tiny spa,” Evelyn offers._ _

__Between her fourth and fifth glass, Amelia starts to talk about her life before this one, about having a husband and the hope of a family one day and none of those things the next one._ _

__By the end of her fifth vodka tonic, Ginny is silently crying without much hope of being able to stop anytime soon._ _

__“Oh, sweety,” Evelyn doesn’t let go of her pink gin bottle but rubs her back and her shoulder with her free hand. “What has the brute done to you?”_ _

__She feels something snapping inside herself, the tears well up in her eyes as she sobs and weeps undignifiedly. “Nothing. Just nothing,” she says, but separated in about thirty two syllables randomly interrupted by sad, uncontrollable hiccups._ _

__Amelia brushes her hair and kisses the top of her head motherly, doesn’t ask what her breakdown is about, doesn’t inquire who is Evelyn talking about, just lets her cry and babble drunken gibberish as she offers silent comfort._ _

__“Sometimes I forget how young you are,” Amelia says as she dries tears from her cheek with her pale, long hands._ _

__“She is a baby. My poor baby girl.” Evelyn hugs her. The bottle half empty by now, hard and cold against Ginny’s back. “I’m going to crack his balls.”_ _

__“Is nobody’s fault,” Ginny says, but it is, it’s her fault. He never promised her anything, never implied more than what he ended up offering her: uncomplicated sex whenever she called._ _

__He never called her asking for sex. Not once. And if she once imagined that she wasn’t going to fall out of love with Lawson just by not sleeping with him, she never figured that it would hurt this much to finally realize that he won’t ever return the depth of her feelings._ _

__Amelia caresses the side of her face. She wonders if she has always been this caring with her and Ginny has just never realized it or if like herself, Amelia also wears an impeccable armor with practiced proficiency._ _

__“I am no physicist, but I’m pretty sure that time and space are the answer to every problem.”_ _

__A little time and a little space is what Evelyn had said earlier in the night referring to her own situation. The might be onto something here._ _

__“And money,” Evelyn adds. “But you don’t have to worry about that one.”_ _

__With the clarity of mind that only comes when enough alcohol has been consumed so that the layers of denial can be rudely dissolved, Ginny understands that she has been a careless fool. Her heart breaks all over again in tiny little pieces as she remembers Mike’s arms, heavy, hard and warm around her. How could she ever thought that she could manage to tone down the feeling he provokes in her is beyond her right now._ _

__“Time and space,” she murmurs._ _

__“And some ice-cream and outrageous shopping,” Evelyn assures patting her hand._ _

__“I can make you as unavailable as you want to be,” Amelia assures her._ _

__The new season is less than two months away, which means a lot of training and some publicity at the very least. Time and space. She can do that._ _

__“I think I’m going to take a look at that mini-series project,” Ginny says, assertive, her tears finally drying out._ _

__“Okay.” Amelia doesn’t stop brushing the tips of her hair._ _

__“And I’ve heard that house hunting is very time consuming.”_ _

__“And fun. Very fun.” Evelyn encourages her._ _

__Ginny nods, fills her glass again, this time only with tonic and gulps the bitter liquid with avidity, drowning her doubts and her fears as she has done her whole life before heading out to the field._ _

__Yes. She can do it._ _

__

__**104 days** _ _

__Ginny is not a vain person by any stretch of the imagination but she has never understood the appeal or the usefulness of being falsely modest with one’s skills either. She knows she has a mean screwball, that she doesn’t look half bad in a designer night dress and that her influence as a public persona can be a powerful tool._ _

__She knows her resolve is ironclad and that she is not scared of hard work or sacrifices. She knows well her skillset, she trust well her skillset._ _

__She gets up early in the morning with a pang of melancholy hitting her hard between her stomach and her lungs and yet she knows she will not call Mike. She goes to the Club and smiles at the janitors, the cleaning ladies, the security staff and all the right people, ignoring the rest without remorse. Gossip journalists, paparazzi, people who try to get her autograph for profit, she has no time or energy to spare to be cordial with any of them._ _

__She hits the gym and tries to oust the memories of the last three months with loud pop music and the flashy music videos that appear on the TV screens as she stretches. She goes through all her floor routine before hitting the ropes, and that is when he enters the gym._ _

__Ginny doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even skip a beat. She does as she has done the scarce times in which she hadn’t been able to dodge his calls: she keeps her cool and waits for the opportunity of an easy way out._ _

__She moves the ropes up and down, up and down, up and down, and empties her mind of anything else, even of the pain of her upper arms._ _

__“Okay, let’s cut all the introductory crap in which I ask you what is going on and you feign you don’t know what am I talking about.”_ _

__She takes a deep breath and lets go of the ropes putting her hands on her hips. This is the verbal equivalent of cornering her between a blade and and a wall, which is so fucking unfair that she can barely believe it herself._ _

__“Geez Lawson, what do you want from me?”_ _

__She sounds more helpless than she would have liked. She is making things as easy for him as humanly possible with her silent retreat: no messy feelings to deal with, no gentle let down to issue and the only thing she has hoped to get in return had been the mutual understanding that her unrequited feelings was a topic that they were never going to address directly ever again, and yet…_ _

__“What about an excuse, or an explanation for starters?”_ _

__He crosses his arms over his chest definitely aggravated. She wonders what other unreasonable requests he might demand of her. A public stoning, maybe? A scarlet letter pinned to her cleats?_ _

__“For what, exactly?”_ _

__“For what? What about the dozen of unreturned calls?”_ _

__She is tempted to answer that she has been busy but the tried excuse dies somewhere in her throat. She already offered him the easy way out more than once and he keeps tossing it aside and asking for a pound of flesh nevertheless. She throws her head back looking at the ceiling and slumping her shoulders._ _

__She is already exhausted of this fucking conversation._ _

__“Seriously, Lawson. What do you want from me?”_ _

__She wants the words spilled out, to hear exactly what are the stupid requirements that she should be meeting according to him. Does he want to keep the rights over the macadamia nuts in her minibar? Is the minimum effort that it requires him to pick up a girl at a bar to be repaid by her somehow? Does he expect for her to fall back into buddie mode immediately?_ _

__He looks at her and in that instant, as if a switch has been turned, all the tension in his face drains out, replaced by hesitancy._ _

__“Why did you stop calling, Ginny?”_ _

__The question is like a low blow but she has long since learned how to fall on her feet._ _

__“Why did you never call?”_ _

__Not once. Not fucking once. She should have understood earlier._ _

__He looks dumbstruck at her accusation, like the thought that he should have cared back, even as little as just booty calling her once, is besides the understanding of a sane person._ _

__“Ginny—”_ _

__“It’s alright. I mean I just—” she interrupts herself. She is not going to explain herself now, after all. “It’s okay.”_ _

__“It doesn’t sound okay.”_ _

__Un-fucking-believable._ _

__She looks around, her eyes set on the treadmill and decides that maybe she can literally run away from this conversation. “It’s okay, just give me a little time, alright? And everything will be back as it was a year ago.” It is not an unreasonable request. Things were good between them a year ago, they could be just as good again. “Being just friends and that stuff.”_ _

__She starts to walk towards the treadmill but Mike moves swiftly and gets in her way, the fucking human mountain._ _

__“Give you a little time for what?”_ _

__She feels the embarrassment flush her face and hopes it is not too obvious. She can’t for the life of her understand why it’s so important for him to hear her say the words but he looks anxious enough about it._ _

__“Ginny? A little time for what?” he repeats impatiently._ _

__She sighs. “I missed you and you cracked a joke. I can take a hint.”_ _

__A bit late, it seems, but she can take a hint._ _

__Mike grins then, his whole face lights up and Ginny squares her jaw and makes fists of her hands, trying to contain her angry humiliation. “It’s not funny.”_ _

__“No, it’s not.” But he keeps grinning and she has the terrible thought that maybe she misconstrued their friendship too, maybe they can’t go back to a thing that was never there to begin with, not really. He puts his hands on her upper arms and pulls her a step closer to him. “Just to clarify, you thought that I wasn’t interested or invested enough?”_ _

__As far as she is concerned it’s a self-explanatory kind of situation._ _

__“You. Cracked. A joke.”_ _

__“Because you were having a rough time and I wanted to lighten the mood!” he says, like he can’t believe her crazy conclusions. “I wasn’t being dismissive.”_ _

__She doesn’t quite comprehend what he is trying to imply. That he didn’t intend to unknowingly end their no-strings-attached relationship? Probably._ _

__“Oh. Well, anyway.”_ _

__She still needs time and space. And ice-cream. Maybe even some outrageous shopping._ _

__“I never called because I am ancient,” he says eagerly searching her eyes. “I am an actual walking fossil, Ginny, and I have years ahead of you, so I don’t miss the frat parties or the sex without strings or whatever that it is that the crazy youngsters are now about.”_ _

__“Crazy youngsters? Really?”_ _

__“The point is that maybe you do.”_ _

__He runs his hands up and down her arms and her body relaxes a little at the familiarity of his touch, the traitor._ _

__She sighs. His misguided consideration for what he thought she might have wanted gives her back some of the dignity she thought she had lost in this conversation but it doesn’t change the fact that she is still in love with him._ _

__“And then there is baseball,” he continues with a sigh, as if the sport that they both love dearly contained all the causes of his despair. “Which I know is hard and demanding, but is no longer my life, so you call the shots here, Rookie. You always have.”_ _

__She nods trying to put her thoughts together. “Okay, so you were kind of distant and shit while we were… doing whatever it was that we were doing because of parties and baseball?”_ _

__He makes a face. It all sounds as ridiculous to him as it does to her. Good to know._ _

__“Yeah, that and I was also scared shitless because I’m a little in love with you.”_ _

__She gasps. She doesn’t know how she expected this conversation to continue but sure as hell it wasn’ with this kind of declaration, with an admission that he loves her back too_ _

__All her blood rushes to her heart, which feels like it might explode. Her hands goes to his cheeks, tracing lightly the contours of his features with the pads of her fingers. He looks so proud of himself, so immensely, uncontainably sure of his words that she can’t doubt them right now._ _

__“You are a cheeseball,” she says, her voice breaks but she doesn’t care._ _

__Mike looks quickly in the general direction of the opened door of the gym but leans towards her nevertheless. His lips graces hers softly, chastely but so unguardedly loving that it changes the game completely. She kisses him back, her mouth only slightly parted as she caresses his naked jaw. She feels sickening happy._ _

__He breaks the kiss with a deep breath. “I’d better go and let you work. See you later?”_ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__“Maybe we could go out for dinner?”_ _

__Ginny smiles widely. “Are you asking me out on a date?”_ _

__“Yes, definitely, “ Mike says putting his hands inside his front pocket and looking coy, something she never thought it was possible. “Been meaning to do it for quite some time now.”_ _

__She nods and bites her lower lip, lets him see her cards. “Good, because I’ve been meaning to say yes for quite some time too.”_ _

__She laughs, a little self-conscious about her sweaty face and her uncombed hair. Lawson gets out of the gym walking backwards, looking at her until he has to turn around in the hallway to keep going and she feels something warm and light bubbling up inside herself._ _

__No need for time or space._ _

__Or ice-cream_ _

__Or outrageous shopping._ _


End file.
